I'm 35, I cut hair for a living in Richmond, Indiana, and I have been playing the same Ms. Pac-Man machine for seventeen years. Not the same kind of machine. The same machine. It's in the back of the restaurant at the Twin Pines truck stop, off I-70 on the east side of town, almost to Ohio, and it has been there, in one corner or another, since April of 1982.

I was eighteen, just out of high school, and waitressing the night shift at the Twin Pines that spring. Three weeks after I started, a man from a vending company in Dayton rolled in a brand new Ms. Pac-Man and plugged it in by the front door, next to the cigarette machine. I put my first quarter in on my break that night and got about 4,000 points. I put in my second quarter about four minutes later.

I quit waitressing in 1984 to go to beauty school. I did not quit Ms. Pac-Man. I still go out there two or three nights a week after the shop closes, have a piece of pie, say hi to Ed, and play until my quarters run out or my wrist gives up. Mostly my quarters.

She's an upright, with Ms. Pac-Man on the side in her bow and her lipstick. The side art is worn off down by the joystick where seventeen years of truckers have leaned on it. She has been moved twice:

• 1982 to 1986: by the front door, next to the cigarette machine. Everybody who walked in saw her. That was the problem. There was always a line.
• 1986 to 1994: by the restrooms in the back, when the cigarette machine needed the spot. Truckers found her anyway. Truckers find everything.
• 1994 to now: the back corner of the restaurant, next to the booth by the drivers' TV room, where Ed moved her when he redid the floors. This is the best spot she's ever had. There's no glare on the screen, I can see the pie case, and nobody bumps you.

The joystick. In the winter of 1991 a driver who shall remain nameless (I know his name) lost on the second board and slammed the stick so hard the ball on top cracked in half. Ed taped it for a month. Then he found a new knob that doesn't match, and it's been the mismatched one ever since. I'm used to it now. I'd probably play worse on a matching one.

Ed. Ed Malley has owned the Twin Pines since before I worked there. In 1990 the vending company in Dayton was getting rid of its old machines, and they came to take her away, and Ed bought her right off the dolly for three hundred dollars cash. He says it was a business decision. He has said that for nine years with a straight face. Since then he has paid out of his own pocket to have the monitor rebuilt by a man in Indianapolis, two new power supplies, and more fuses than I can count, and he keeps a spare joystick in his office desk in case of nameless drivers. Every time something goes wrong with her, the first thing Ed does is call me at the shop so I won't drive all the way out for nothing. That's Ed.

Here's something people don't know: Ms. Pac-Man doesn't save your initials. It shows the high score at the top of the screen and that's all, and the minute somebody unplugs her to mop behind her, it's gone. So in 1983 Ed taped a piece of white poster board to the side of the cabinet and hung a marker on a string. You write down your initials and your score, and Ed or whoever's on the register signs off on it if they saw it. If nobody saw it, it doesn't go on the board. That's the rule.

The board has been replaced six times. The rule since 1987 is one line per person, your best only, or it would just be me all the way down. Here's what it says tonight:

DLK is me. EM is Ed, who says he only plays to make sure she's working. The rest are drivers, and you can read about them on the truckers page. Yes, LKY is somebody who beat me once. Read about that too. I keep it up there because fair is fair, and because it makes me play harder every time I look at it.

My best ever is 141,390, on a Thursday night in August of 1998, about 12:40 in the morning. I was further along than I had ever been in my life, and the banana came out, and I ate it, and my hand was shaking so bad I died about thirty seconds later. Ed signed it. The whole history is on the score log.

Seventeen years of quarters. Here's what I know.

The four mazes. Ms. Pac-Man isn't one maze over and over like Pac-Man. She's got four, and they change after the intermissions:

• Pink, boards 1 and 2. Your warm-up. Two pairs of escape tunnels.
• Light blue, boards 3, 4 and 5. Also two pairs of tunnels. Learn this one cold.
• Orange, boards 6 through 9. (Truckers call it brown. It's orange.) Only one pair of tunnels, so you've got fewer places to run. This is where most people die.
• Dark blue, boards 10 through 13. Two pairs of tunnels again, and by now everything is fast.

After that it goes back and forth between the orange one and the dark blue one, every few boards, in different colors. If you're seeing the different colors, you're doing good.

Use the tunnels. The ghosts slow down in the tunnels and you don't. When you're in trouble, head for one. When you come out the other side, you've bought yourself a second or two. That's a lot.

Know your ghosts. Blinky is the red one and he comes right at you. Pinky likes to get out in front of you. Inky is the blue one and you never know with Inky. And the orange one is Sue. Not Clyde. Clyde's in the other game. Sue's a lady. She acts like she isn't paying attention to you, and she is.

Don't play patterns. The guys who were good at regular Pac-Man had patterns, the same route every board, and the ghosts did the same thing every time. Ms. Pac-Man's ghosts don't do that. They're a little bit random. You have to watch them, not memorize them. I think that's why I like her better.

The fruit. In Ms. Pac-Man the fruit doesn't sit still in the middle. It comes in through a tunnel and bounces around the maze and leaves through a tunnel if you don't get it. Don't chase it into a ghost. Here's what they're worth:

That's one new fruit for each of the first seven boards. After that, it's whatever she feels like. A banana is the best thing that can happen to you. It's also how I died at 141,390.

Eat the ghosts. When you eat a big flashing dot, the energizer, the ghosts turn blue and run, and you can eat them. The first one is 200, then 400, then 800, then 1,600. So the trick is to wait. Don't eat the energizer the second you get to it. Hang around next to it until the ghosts come close, then eat it and go get them while they're bunched up. Four ghosts on one energizer is 3,000 points. On the later boards they don't stay blue very long, and then hardly at all, so get your ghost points early in the game while you can.

Extra man at 10,000. That's the only one on our machine. Don't waste it.

Last tip. Hold the stick, don't strangle it. You'll last longer, and so will the joystick.

A note for Ray: I found a fellow on here, Ray, who has a page called INSERT COIN about the arcade he grew up in, and he says he's looking for a Ms. Pac-Man cocktail table, the sit-down kind with the glass top, so his wife has something to play. Good luck, Ray. Ours is an upright, and she isn't going anywhere.