A Little Advice From Bob Marley

Don’t Worry About a Thing…

by Jack Guarnieri, Jersey Jack Pinball & PinballSales.com

We’re open, but we’re also kind of worried we may go a few steps backwards. The delta variant is raging in many places, especially among the unvaccinated. How about lambda…Is that anything to worry about?

What does all this mean to your life, your business and our industry? For restaurants, schools and hospitality, mandated masks are back in many areas. Vaccine passports look like the way of the future. I can’t see us going back to the dark days of lockdowns, but how do we manage all of these variables? “One day at a time,” I’d say.

Last week I went to The Meadowlands to see Guns ’N’ Roses. It was the first concert held there since September 2019 and man was it packed. I’d say over 40,000 people were there and not too many were wearing masks. It was an awesome time and it felt so good to be out and normal again. I also felt safe and responsible. It was outside and I felt like I had a better chance of getting a contact high than a Covid infection.

By the way, I flew to Chicago last week too (it was a busy week). Both airports there and back were packed and it seemed like the busiest I’ve ever seen.

Now, what about the ups and downs of all this? I can’t get too stressed about the situation. We all need to be safe and do our best to take care of our families and our livelihoods. Friends tell me that factories are out several months on deliveries of some games, as well as anything imported getting slammed with higher prices and longer wait times.

There is still so many things out of our control, so why worry about it?

Worry won’t fix it. Do your best and stay on top of things, but don’t let the worry get to you. One of my favorite songs is Three Little Birds by Bob Marley. Perhaps it should be an anthem of sorts for many of us to look at the bigger picture. “Don’t worry about a thing!”

Jack Guarnieri started servicing electro-mechanical pinball machines in 1975 and has been involved in every phase of the amusement game business since then. He was an operator in NYC, then began a distributorship in 1999, PinballSales.com, selling coin-op to the consumer market. In January of 2011, he founded Jersey Jack Pinball (named after his RePlay Magazine pen name), which builds award-winning, full-featured, coin-op pinball machines. Email Jack at jack@ jerseyjackpinball.com.