As a weight guesser, Mike Caron knows that loose lips will get you socked in the gut — esepecially when the customer is on the portly side.
So he's always careful to ask, "Do you want me to guess out loud, or write it down?" It's a professional precaution. Nobody wants the whole midway to know the weight-guesser thinks you're a porker.
"I got hit once," Caron said. "Now I ask."
But flattering patter always works — even when it's a tad flirtatious. As he hands an inflatable baseball bat to a winning mother and her toddler, he jokes, "My guidance counselor was wrong. Women pay me to look at them."
Thad Ogburn is The N&O's Metro Editor, overseeing most local news reporting. His previous jobs have included editor of North Raleigh News and Features Editor, during which he learned that comics attract more reader response than just about anything else we do. His guilty pleasure is reality TV, which he finds not very real at all. That's assuming, of course, there is room on his DVR amid his daughter's "iCarly" episodes and his wife's daily installments of "One Life To Live."
