Day job is doing IT and related computer tasks at a beauty/barber college, a trade school. We're training people to become barbers and more. We also have to deal with walk-ins that students perform services on.
We recently got a batch of new students. There is a lot of downtime just as a normal part of daily operations. Frequently I am playing yoyos as I feel more comfortable with those over a hard surface. One of the new students, who happens to be Mexican, asked if I knew how to play trompo.... and as luck would have it, I had 2 small cases with my tops in them. Thanks to this forum, I knew what he was talking about! He was more familiar with battle tops, not acrobatic tops. I think I'll be teaching him what I know as time allows. He wasn't familiar with things like boomerang and tricks but knew that sort of stuff exists.
Dealing with small kids and trying to keep them distracted is something I often have to deal with. Skill toys work quite nicely. Many of the students see having additional skills beyond barbering as something of high interest. There's a lot of stuff I can't perform yet, but that's OK. I think knowing things like basic coin sleights and other similar "parlor tricks" are super fast to set up, quick to perform and quickly seem to get people interested. This also pushes me to try to finally learn other stuff like more yoyo and top tricks, finally learn 3-ball cascade and get proficient with flower sticks. Juggling is another fast and easy pleaser that requires very short set-up time.
At the rate things are going, with student interests, there's going to end up being "field trips" on days the school is closed to a local park to learn and practice skill toys and other entertaining skills the want to learn and share. Seems I should stock up on the new YYF tops and maybe some YYF plastic yoyos for selling to the students. They already use my stuff to try before committing. It's good to use downtime in a productive manner.
