Today was pretty much a washout as Jane was really hungover. She had drunk quite a lot the previous night. We all set out to go to Brixham, but we had to turn around and drop Jane back at home, she was that rough. Colin, Myrtle and I went to Brixham, it was nice. We saw some nice paintings and lots of tasty looking fish. In the evening we went to The Ship Inn at Cockwood. It was a nice little place, the steak was delicious. I do like steak.
Seeing as this entry is a bit short, I think I’m going to tell you about our advanced tactics of “winning” on the 2p Pushers. It’s incredibly therapeutic, slotting several 2p coins into a machine and eventually retrieving a token (tokens can be seen on the pictures below) or two. You quickly learn which machines to avoid and which to go for. Ones that the arcade employees have recently re-jigged the tokens on: Avoid. Ones that a small child or elderly lady have recently given up on or have run out of coins to play: Play. Most people play in a sedate manner, one coin at a time, and get bored when the tokens barely move. You see kids and old folks playing like this all the time, plopping one coin in at a time, watching it go into the machine, possibly moving one or two other coins slightly, then slowly putting another coin in, and so on, in a war of attrition that they really can’t win because they are going so slowly.
The key is to insert two coins at once, with good timing, at regular intervals, so that they fall onto the sliding bit just as there is space for them to land and lie flat. Then, when the coins go back into them, there is maximum movement. When the metal slider comes back towards you, insert two more coins so they can do the same and you can actually cause some momentum. Sometimes after as little as 10-14 coins have been put in there is definite movement in the sea of 2 pence pieces. Keep up nice timing and eventually all the tokens will be yours. Things changed a little this year, as they had installed “rapid fire” slots on all the machines which encouraged people to smash coins in at an alarming rate. At first I was brainwashed into doing so, but quickly reverted to tried and tested tactics. The rapid fire slots simply caused the coins to block the passageways more often than not, rendering all previous play obsolete.
I do like the 2p Pusher machines.
