I worked at a major movie theater for about five months. I had signed up for a class in high school that allowed me to leave school early as long as I had employment. The class was only offered to juniors and seniors, and in my junior year I had worked at a grocery store as a bagger and cart collector. I eventually quit after working there for four or five months and not getting a promotion to cashier. I don't really know why I cared, as I enjoyed pushing the carts around at night. I'd spend most of my time running around in the nearly empty parking lot, riding my cart though the roaming flocks of blackbirds that would cluster around spilled grocery items.
But senior year came, and I needed to find another job or be forced to switch out of the work "class" and into a real class. My friend Matt offered to try and get me a job as an usher at this movie theater, but when I went in for the interview, the only position open was working the concessions. Again, I didn't care at the time, because this guaranteed me one less hour of school each weekday.
I quickly learned that I had accepted probably the hardest job in a movie theater. For attire, we had to wear a t-shirt with either the theater's logo or some advertisement for an upcoming movie, black slacks, black shoes, black socks, a black belt and (are you sensing a theme?) a black apron. Fairly standard work clothes, but there is a hitch: working as a consessions is extremely messy. If you're not walking on sticky syrup from a spilled soft drink, you're smearing hot butter on your pant legs or dusting yourself with powdered cheese. So it was often a lesson in futility if you were trying to stay clean, so the managers told us just to wear the same outfit for a week before you throw it through the wash. Maybe I had still not developed a keen sense of smell yet, or I have suppressed the thoughts of my odor, but I have no memory of what must have been a foul conglomeration of burnt popcorn, greasy butter, cheesy powder, and sticky sweet syrup.
The work level varied from long stretches of utter boredom to frenetic races to provide everyone in line with their confections when hit movies were about to be shown. All the while, I would see my friend Matt, leaning on a broom, chatting up some girl (one of which turned out to be his future wife), waiting for the next movie to finish so he could sweep the aisles and shoo off all the rats. (If you don't think your local movie theater has rats, you're sorely mistaken.)
The frantic pace during those times didn't get to me much, because I'd welcome the work after the endless drudgery between seatings. Most of my fellow concession workers were vapid slugs who spent most of all their downtime trying to hit on the fat stoner girl who worked back there with us. We did have a few moments of inspiration during the downtime, though. We could eat and drink all the popcorn and coke we wanted, but just not when customers were around and not with any of the official paper cups and plastic bags for the buyers. We'd create little pouches out of the hot dog wrapping paper, then wait for the moment the first kernels of popcorn came bursting out of the popper, all smothered with grease and butter and soft and chewy when munched on, by holding our pouches right under the overflow. Sometimes an unpopped kernel would be pushed out of the tin and land on my hand, scalding me with the molten hot oil, but the minor pain was well worth it. We also had to use little Dixie cups for the soft drinks, but with endless refills, size didn't matter. Finally, we had these cheap surgical gloves we had to use to handle the hot dogs and hot dog buns with, so we'd fill the fingers with fruit punch and hang them upside-down in the freezers in the back room and had little Popsicles.
The most ridiculous thing we ever did on the job, however, wasn't at all for our benefit. In fact, if we would have been caught doing it, anyone associated with it would be been immediately fired. There was a roach infestation (again, like in all theaters) and one of my co-workers had managed to catch one in our Dixie cups. He wanted to kill it, but didn't want to touch it, so he smothered it with the hot popcorn butter. Then he started showing the rest of the shift what he had done. In a moment of inspiration (or idiocy, depends on your perspective), I took the Dixie cup. There were a few small freezers out on the back counter where we would store these little ice cream snacks called Dibs. The door to the freezer was clear so a consumer could see them. So I took the roach- and butter-filled Dixie cup and put it in the freezer. I couldn't just put it in the freezer openly, or have it sitting there viewable, so I positioned it directly behind a Dibs container, and moved the other Dibs on each side closer to the middle one to block off all view. As I put the cup in the freezer, however, I noticed that the cockroach wasn't quite dead yet, but I didn't want to touch it either, so I just figured the combination of thick butter and cold temperatures would surely finish it off. After the next wave of customers had filed in and got their food (luckily, no one wanted Dibs), I told the rest of the shift that it wasn't quite dead. We had planned on letting the butter freeze, then adding more hot butter to thaw it out, then see if the roach went all Lazarus on us and came back to life, but by the time my shift had ended, only a small layer of the butter had frozen over.
I worked there for about four more months, then realized that the work "class" I was in did not seem to check whether I was still employed after the initial paperwork, so I quit. I never got moved to usher and work the cake job, but I didn't really need the money so quitting was a better option than begging for reassignment.
So there was my first "Stories from the Wastes." As I remember more interesting events that have enough meat to them to call for a blog post, I'll continue the series. I hope it brought a few laughs, or at the very least got you thinking about terrible jobs you have had in the past.
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