Photo: Tetra Images (Getty)
Those old kids and their damn rap music. Wait, what?
According to MassLive, officials at the Holyoke Senior Center have really stirred the pot by reducing the number of times bingo games will be held from four Fridays a month to two, and they’re doing so because the old folks are allegedly acting like a bunch of eight-year-olds who are all hopped up on Mountain Dew.
“The Friday bingo mindset seems to infect people who behave rationally all other days of the week,” said Navae Fenwick Rodriguez, executive director of the Holyoke Council on Aging (COA), who followed up that comment by sending an email to city councilors that outlined what turned out to be a large number of complaints about the seniors’ unruliness.
Amongst those complaints? You guessed it: Seniors banging on doors of other rooms at the facility, sneaking people in for lunch when a ticket is required, being rude to staff and volunteers, leaving the room a mess and…wait for it…threatening to egg the vehicles of staff and volunteers upon learning bingo regularity was in jeopardy.
“In (one) case, a player yelled at a (COA) board member because the board was meeting in the multipurpose room prior to bingo,” Rodriguez said. “Though it was only 11:15, and bingo doesn’t start until 1, she didn’t think the board had any right to prevent her from getting to her coveted seat.”
The reduction in bingo days has obviously infuriated most of the elderly players, and a petition was quickly drawn up to put an end to that noise. Now, whether or not any of them know how to scan that petition once it gets the desired amount of signatures and email to the right person on a computer remains to be seen.
