August 17, 2004
Worst / Best
In RA staff meetings for the past couple years, every once in a while we'd play a game called (I think) "Worst / Best." The idea was simple - you listed your worst memory/moment from the past week, and then your best memory/moment from the past week. The game was always interesting in that the rest of the group would commiserate with you and your experiences and everyone would get some sort of catharsis for your joys and your pains from the past week. It also could become a game of oneupmanship as each person after you tried to either relate how much worse or better their moments were than yours.
Needless to say it was always a lot of fun and a decent icebreaker.
So I have my worst/best moments from the past week. Both happened at work. Both happened this weekend. Both happened on back to back shifts.
(Background: I (used to, as of Sunday) work at a movie theater, Regal Cinemas Hunt Valley 12 as an assistant manager. I've worked there for about 5 years on and off, as I started way back right as "Star Wars: Episode One" was opening.)
My worst was Saturday at work. I'm scheduled for a 2-10 swing shift, which means I'm pretty much damned from the beginning as I don't get to experience either the slowest set in the morning, or the slowest set at night, both of which act as a buffer that I've found allows me to unwind. It means a constant barrage of customers, for which I'm stuck on the floor with escape to the upstairs office impossible. It just gets worse as the General Manager tells me as I walk in 15 minutes early that there were 2 employees who called out, and that "they're going to need help down there."
I should mention that I went in feeling scatterbrained because my sister was coming in from Paris that afternoon and my parents had gone to Dulles to pick her up. I hadn't seen her in 2 months, and was really looking forward to seeing her again before I headed back to Philadelphia (indeed, my staying home this long had a lot to do with me wanting to hang out with her for a few more days.)
I wind up spending the worst shift of my entire 5 years on the floor. I'm stuck in the concession stand for about three hours straight as a constant stream of people come up wanting popcorn and soda. For the entire three hours, the lines stretched in front of the stand for the twenty feet to the box offices (where the lines stretched twenty feet to the front doors.) From this hellish sea of people, I somehow wound up with the line that decided to inform me of how exactly I should be doing my job. It took all my strength of character to fill their wretched orders and not jump over the counter and ram the overpriced popcorn, layered in the middle with butter as per their instructions, and their sodas-costing-more-than-gold-per-ounce, poured over the exact amount of ice desired, down their throats.
The evening continues to degrade by leaps and bounds as I manage to not get much of a break in between the afternoon and first evening shift. Around 9:00 a customer storms out of one of the theaters demanding the right to a refund of his tickets AFTER he watches his movie because kids are "running up and down the aisles" and the movie is blurry and unwatchable. I tell him that I'll look into his charges and he goes back to his film. The movie is checked, and the kids are nonexistent, however, our print is scratched to all hell (in a way that none of the managers on could figure out how, including the head projectionist) but is still pretty watchable, as proved by the fact that his was the only complaint all day.
The night concludes with confirmation that an employee is stealing from us. This is something I've heard about, but never experienced with hard evidence in front of me. It was tough - I'm naive, I'll admit - sheltered, privileged, all that. And I tend to take things too personally. This was happening at 9:30, when I was due out the door in a half hour, and I was already at the end of my rope from prior events.
In the end, everything turns out okay - the customers leave after their movies. The angry patron leaves, satisfied with my apologies and passes. The employee leaves, escorted by a cop. I leave, dinner in hand, just wanting to get the hell out as quickly as possible and never come back.
Sunday was on my top five shifts ever. I'm scheduled for a closing 5-12 shift. For starters, it was my last shift. I get there and check the admission logs and find that we're not that busy. It's an awesome crew for the time that I'm there. I wind up having one of the silliest shifts ever.
It began upstairs when we had three managers helping the one projectionist thread up the first evening set. It usually takes the projectionist about five minutes to get through one projector - we had the entire left half of the booth done in about ten minutes. This quickly led to a threading contest between myself and two other managers - Corbin, and Billy, the head projectionist. I lost, but did damn well considering I haven't touched the equipment in six months. We had a cake and ice cream during out break for Sarah, who was also celebrating her "last" day at work. I had to hustle to clean theaters, but found $14 under a seat.
The crowning achievement however, was the unveiling of an original film after hours that evening. Midway through the shift, Billy decides to splice together all of the reels from films that had somehow become marooned in our booth, castoffs from prints long gone. I suggest we throw on some Regal policy trailers (translated: those stupid "no smoking, in case of emergency..." ads that get added before films) and any random old trailers we have lying around. We wind up with two Regal policy snipes, a couple of current trailers, a trailer for "Baby Geniuses 2" spliced on backwards and upside down so the soundtrack is projected onscreen (we all agreed that this would be the only possible way to see the movie,) and our "lost" reels - one each from "Half Past Dead," "LOTR: The Two Towers," "Star Trek: Nemesis," "Mystic River," and "Tears of the Sun."
As we were leaving at 3:30AM we pretty much decided that it was a fun experiment, but one that sounded better talking about it than actually doing it. But it was done with fun people, and it reminded me a lot of the (now banned by corporate) screenings that used to happen in the first summer that I worked there complete with a 7-11 run to begin the evening.
So I turned in my keys to the building. I'm know I'm gonna miss the people, despite having only been there for about three weeks.
The next step for me is getting the heck out of Baltimore later this week. More on that as it develops.