Saturday, December 3, 2011

Cinema Customer Scoop #4: 'Sir.'

Working at Cinemas have likely been detrimental to my health. Not from eating too much popcorn (can't stand more than a handful of the stuff), or from an overdose of caffeinated beverages, but from those people who seems to mindlessly wander in and expect nothing but my indebted servitude. I've likely lost a few blood vessels in my eyes due to the stress given by the amount of needless stupidity expressed by cinema clientele.

For example, I opened on a Saturday a few weeks back, and for some reason some of the front doors was left unlocked from the night before. Mind you, there you have to go though two sets of doors to enter into the lobby, so there is a small area between the sets of doors, forming a makeshift zoo enclosure. A few people entered into the lobby before we actually opened, and I told them to please wait outside as we were not yet open for business. The first group of people understood and promptly waited outside in front of the box office, sadly the subsequent people did not have the mental capacity to understand and follow such orders.

The next people who came found the first unlocked door, but did not take the time to check all of the doors in the second group, instantly coming to the conclusion that they were trapped. Simply going back out of the door they just walked though never even occurred to them, and they didn't bother to warn any of the poor souls coming in that they too would also be stuck. So, in the span of about five minutes a horde of idiots flooded the small space, only to have walk back outside once the doors were unlocked, as the window where you pay is outside of the lobby, not the other way around.

Upon the day of me writing this, a boy found a way of making my brain explode by doing something so stupid that made my brain nearly perform an illegal operation, and have to shut down. At my theater we have a machine that makes a particular frozen beverage, of which we have two flavors. But, due to the extreme cheapness of our general manager, we rarely (if ever) perform any maintenance on the machine (I wouldn't be surprised if he just took it out of the dumpster from another theater.) So, when it isn't producing soupy drinks, it feels the need to cause the beverage to expand inside of its cup. This has led to many people being given drinks which overflow and spill on the counter. No matter how many times you tell people that it will expand, and that they should drink it, they never listen.

But today was no different. Normally you can catch the expanding drinks before the flow out the top, and dump out the excess in the sink, but some get away. Normally people who get away with an expanding drink notice, and dump the excess in the trash, or down it in one gulp, yet not today. A young lad of Tom Sawyer age had his grandmother buy him a cherry frozen-drink, then went on his merry way. My friend Jerrod and I become occupied with filling out a crossword puzzle when I heard the word "sir" being said in the lobby. I looked up to see the little gremlin standing towards me, holding up his now overflowing drink in the air like the Olympic torch.

He just stood there stupidly holding up his drink, and saying "sir" as though I could enter in a fantastical code that could make his drink stop spilling and go back into his cup. Perhaps he was waiting for me to come around and take it from him, but I guess kids don't believe in counters, seeing as one was standing in between the two of us. In the time it would take me to venture over to where he was, I'm sure he would have found a way to spill the rest of his drink, then set the building on fire. After a few seconds I sighed and told him to bring his drink over to the counter, because apparently he didn't know such a thing was possible. Thankfully someone else took care of his mess as Jerrod and I both had to retreat to the scullery to both laugh hysterically, and become enraged.

The following emotions were so contradictive that my brain melted from exhaustion and had this article written by the Alejandroid 2.0.