So, how well does this work in practice? It depends on who you ask. At his branch, Mark says they occupy the kid check stand religiously. If the employee assigned to it steps more than five feet away without getting someone else to cover it, they're fired, no second chances. This happened to two employees during his time there. This guards not just against body snatchers, but against the occasional child drunk on orange Hi-C sprinting out of the restaurant and right into oncoming traffic.

CEC North Georgia / YouTube

"People try and leave all the time with mismatched stamps," he says, but it's not as worrying as it sounds. Invariably, it's because some child came in with perhaps their father and leaves with their grandmother, which is usually not a case of kidnapping. Mark asks her, "Can you prove that you really are this child's grandparent?" The old lady replies, "You're darn tootin'!" And she takes out an iPhone, containing hundreds of smiling photos of the two of them together.

Heather, on the other hand, had less confidence in the system, saying the numbers frequently smear into an unreadable glowing blob. "I'd pretend I could still read them and go, 'yep, you're all good'," she says. "I'd get comments from the adults about how good I must be at my job to decipher some meaning in the blobs. Nope." Instead, she'd rely on her own memory of who entered with whom, while also keeping an eye out for any exiting child who happened to be crying and screaming.

"In one instance, we had to break up a fight between two young women," says Heather. "Each one had a baby in one arm and was throwing punches with the other. We ended up calling the police on them ... We're not entirely sure what set them off, but honestly nothing at Chuck E. Cheese is worth putting your child in harm's way."

Big Cheese / YouTube

"Another time, we were having a birthday party at the restaurant. Out of nowhere, the parents start yelling and throwing punches at each other and the entire family erupts in a fight. They knock over all the tables in the surrounding birthday rows with food and drink flying everywhere. The cops were called, someone with a warrant was arrested, there was hair pulled out on the floor, it was a real mess. We were there until 1 a.m. scrubbing food out of the carpet."

On yet another occasion, a manager at Heather's location got the shit beaten out of him by a group of parents because one of the games was momentarily out of order.

chuck_e._live/Instagram

Why does stuff like that keep happening? For one: Alcohol. Chuck E. Cheese's serves beer, but many adults find that doesn't get them quite drunk enough to endure a children's birthday party. "I used to find empty booze containers in the ladies room all the time, and I can only imagine how much contraband booze we didn't find."

First off, good news: We're not going to tell you what it's like to have to clean diarrhea out of a ball pit. "We actually don't have a ball pit at our location," says Mark, cheerfully. But the rest of the funhouse -- that twisted complex of tubes and slides that's super fun to crawl through -- is full of crevices perfect for hiding little kid poop. "Probably my favorite story," says Matt, "was the time some kid dropped his shorts and went down the slide." The honor fell upon Matt to scale the slide and hunt down every shit streak before the next birthday party could begin.

Big Cheese / YouTube

There's roughly one poop cleanup weekly, says Mark. And one more for piss -- when a panicked child asks you which way to the bathroom, it's even money that he'll take three steps before yelling "too late!" and letting loose yellow fury. Major barf cleanups number about three per week. Matt recalls one Friday night when an especially creative kid threw up not on the floor, but into one of those water-shooting arcade machines. "It wasn't discovered until Monday morning," he says. "So glad I wasn't there to have to clean those filters ..."

And then you've got this guy:

Mark Sullivan / WireImage / GettyImages

We've told you before how smelly and claustrophobic life can be inside a full-body mascot costume, and those were the costumes at Disney World -- the best of the best. With Chuck E. Cheese's, you'll get untrained teens donning the mask and, half-blind, running over little kids. As for dealing with that interior stink, management washes the thing somewhere between "rarely" and "never."

"We brush the pizza sauce and cake off the outside," says Adam, "so Chuck E. doesn't look like a hobo, but the inside only gets cleaned when the budget allows." That's once a year, maybe. Otherwise, they have to use Febreze, and most employees don't bother. "I could always tell what the helmet would smell like," says Mark, "based off of who was having to wear it that day."

Martiniturbide / Wiki Commons

Oh ...

Belle & Wissell, Co.

"Taking care of the animatronics was one of my bigger duties," Adam explains. "Chuck E. looks like a Terminator when you take all of his fur off. He always looked, I guess psychotic would be the best word, without the face. Like he just couldn't wait to tear from his bolts and start smashing people," and the really scary part is that this sort of thing does actually happen.

"One time, Chuck E.'s wrist actuator sliced through the bolt holding the hand bracket on and it just fell loose. So Chuck E. is dancing away with his wrist swinging around like the world's worst nunchuck ... Another time his back actuator went out, which had him leaning way forward for his whole dance set. One song was heavy on the arm movements so he kept karate chopping and upper cutting the stage barrier, eventually busting it," like Johnny Five from Short Circuit if he was doing a cameo on Westworld.

Leo Lion / YouTube

The only thing that kept Adam from burning his restaurant down with a holy, cleansing fire, was the fact that he got to humiliate the robots every once in awhile. "I had a controller that controlled the robots' movements. I could almost get Chuckie's arms close enough to make a 'Fuck You' gesture, and of course, hip thrusting and imaginary ass slapping." Of course.

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