Last week, I went to the Ocean County Mall to do some holiday shopping and was kind of surprised by something that I saw there that made me feel like a little bit more discretion could have been used in deciding to add it to the mall.

Here, I'll just show you:

"Hurricane Simulator" at the Ocean County Mall (Photo by Justin Louis)
"Hurricane Simulator" at the Ocean County Mall (Photo by Justin Louis)
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Yes, you too can take a break from your Christmas shopping and pay to experience a hurricane right there at the mall!

According to the manufacturer, you pay 2 bucks to experience "78 MPH OF FUN!" while the screen beckons you with, "CAN YOU SURVIVE?"

What fun, indeed!

Except, no.

We may be 5 years on from Superstorm Sandy, but for a lot of us here at the Shore, the memories of the actual, not simulated, 80mph sustained winds and 100mph gusts weren't so much "fun" as they were "life alteringly terrifying".

And it didn't even cost $2 a ride.

No, it just cost about $30 billion in property damage.

I'm not a total fun-Scrooge, I just think that enticing people to pay for the "fun" of experiencing a natural disaster in a place where most of us lived through one that quite literally ruined lives is a little, well, tacky.

Look, I've been writing on the Internet long enough to know that I'll get called a snowflake, accused of taking it too seriously, and probably both more creative insults and much, much less creative ones, too.

It's cool, I can handle it.

But think about this, too:

Call me over-sensitive. Call me too serious. Heck, call me fake news, it doesn't really bother me. Honest.

Because like most of WOBM's listeners and readers, I also lived in Ocean County through Sandy. And you know what? It wasn't fun.

Can I have my $2 back now?

 

More from WOBM - Sandy then and now:

The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of 92.7 WOBM, Townsquare Media, its employees, or advertisers.

 

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