N scale question of the week! 11 August 2011

[delamaize]

Hey everyone, sorry about the delay again, I was on a train most of the day yesterday, and my internet access was spotty at best. Prague is the City of choice tonight, and the internet is stable sooooo.........

Short question this week:
what was THE worst layout/show visitor you have ever expirenced.

for me, Never a Layout visitor, because I dont' have a layout worth visiting  ;D But the ones I oberve at shows all the time, The Child that don't understand what "dont touch" means and the parents that think it is cute.

So what is your guys horror stories?

[ljudice]

The ones who say "hey, that's a nice train setup you made for your kids".

[wm3798]

At the club open house, the gawker who looks at the permanent layout installation and asks "how long does it take to set that up?"

[rochsub]

At the club open house, the gawker who looks at the permanent layout installation and asks "how long does it take to set that up?"

Worse than that is "how much did it all cost/"

Also annoying are those who look at my layout for two minutes and then spend the rest of the time telling me about their layout.  HO guys are really good at this for some reason.

[sizemore]

I'm gonna have to go with every @$$h0|3 and elbow at the Scale Show. Walking is similar to driving, you don't stop in the fast lane of traffic, neither should you stop in the middle of an aisle when walking.

The S.

[seusscaboose]

This has been my expereince (i have only hosted a few NMRA openhouses)
A$$Hats, in general, are excluded from these comments (Hence, the Extra Board)

The visitor who:
- Park's in your driveway (as if they own the house)
- Leaves behind litter (when a trash can is clearly visable)
- Picks up models (with ham hands).  (I admit this rarely happens with adults, which is why i don't encourage youth visitors)
- Demonstrates no diplomacy when discussing scales/prototypes (as if they walk on water.  It is called humility.  Learn it, Live it, Love it.)
- Walks out without saying "thank you" (my 5 year old knows please/thank you, why don't "you"?)

and (best of all) 
-The visitor who comes in and asks "how much did this cost". (Open mouth, insert foot).

Ugh. >


lol... ok.... Time for Fresh Air...   

 ;D

[cv_acr]

At the club open house, the gawker who looks at the permanent layout installation and asks "how long does it take to set that up?"

12 years and counting for my club's layout...

[Catt]

NMRA regonal meet,we are on the layout tours.This guy comes down to view the layouts but refuses to look at our N scale layout as," you can't do anything thing with that tiny stuff." to which his wife replied ,"so your not doing anything with that big stuff,atleast these trains are moving."

Trainshow where we have the NTRAK set up and this clown thinks it's real funny to bump the layout and stringline a 100 car coal train on the end loop.

[seusscaboose]

Trainshow where we have the NTRAK set up and this clown thinks it's real funny to bump the layout and stringline a 100 car coal train on the end loop.

that would send me to the moon!

[Philip H]

NMRA regonal meet,we are on the layout tours.This guy comes down to view the layouts but refuses to look at our N scale layout as," you can't do anything thing with that tiny stuff." to which his wife replied ,"so your not doing anything with that big stuff,atleast these trains are moving."

Smart woman . . .

[Bendtracker1]

So what is your guys horror stories?

We did a Mall show over the Holidays years ago at one of the local Malls.

One afternoon this individual who was not quit all there, ran into the room and right up to the layout and started saying in louder voice,
"I LIKE TRAINS, MY BROTHER LIKES TRAINS, YEAH, YEAH"  and kept repeating it over and over and would dash around the layout and push the other people out of the way so he could see the trains.
At one point one of the members started to notice that he had a rather large amount of drool dangling! So we kept an eye on him for awhile.

A few minutes later, there was a short on a section of mainline #1 and after a quick glance in the direction we seen him standing there, eyeing the train that had stopped.  We figured he had bumped the layout and caused a derailment.

After a closer inspection we found the problem.  He had drooled enough that it had puddled on the rails and caused a short!   

After that, we nicknamed him "Hootch" [from the movie Turner & Hootch] and every time he would show up, someone would call out over the headphones "Hootch is in the house" and we'd grab the roll of paper towels and keep it handy.