Dr. Awkward

I had a great time at work tonight. I usually prefer not to be manager of the usher department because I’m not a big fan of picking up other peoples’ trash, but two of the three people I was managing are fantastic employees, not to mention they’re also pretty decent people (the third one just barely does the minimum to get by, which pisses me off). We cleaned the entire night and I actually enjoyed our conversations.

At one point in time we took out the trash and had to break down this gigantic standee (the big cardboard movie advertisements you see in theatres). We went outside and it was SUPER windy and as we were breaking it down we were all making noises like we were all really muscular men and the wind kept trying (and oftentimes succeeding) to blow us around. When we would try to put the cardboard sections into the trash compactor we had to fight with the wind to get them in there. Who knew breaking down a giant box could be so much fun?

Something astounded me tonight as well, which doesn’t happen often. There were these five kids (ranging from about 4 to 15) that were in a theater who were causing a ridiculous amount of commotion before their movie started. So I went in and said, “Okay, guys. Your movie hasn’t even started yet and you’re already being obnoxious. If you don’t quiet down and I have to come in here because you’re disrupting other customers, I will kick you out. Take this as your warning.” To this they replied with sarcastic, “Oh, YES, SIR!“‘s and one of them started spouting out ridiculous shit like “Hohoho, I like apppplesss!” (WTF???) But I left them in hopes they’d take me seriously. They didn’t. They started parading around the inside of their theater and ran to the front of the theater and started touching the screen, so a customer came and found me to let me know they were being rowdy again. So I went back to the theater to address the situation, but for some reason they were in the hallway. I walked up to the kids (AND THEIR PARENTS WERE THERE!) and was like, “I’m sure you don’t know this, but that screen you guys were messing with costs tens of thousands of dollars…so if you ended up damaging it, you would be responsible for it. Please don’t touch our equipment.” More sarcastic retorts were given to me here, and I walked away hoping the kids’ parents would reprimand their children, because I knew they’d heard me. They didn’t say anything, which really pissed me off, but I just kept walking, knowing that it was very likely I’d have to come back in another 15 minutes to kick them out of the theatre. So this family goes back into the theater because their movie is about to start and I went about my duties. A few minutes later I ran into another manager who was walking down the hallway towards me and he said that three people had just exchanged their tickets because of some rowdy kids in a theater. I walked with him to the theater and the two of us went up to the kids and both gave them a very stern talking-to. (I mean, who else is going to do it? Mom and dad weren’t! They were seriously just sitting there, not a care in the world. IF YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE KIDS, YOU NEED TO BE PARENTAL TOWARDS THEM.) The kids quieted down after that and we didn’t have any problems with them the rest of the night. About 30 minutes later my employees and I were about to go on another trash run. As I was walking by the theater, two of the kids we’d been having problems with started walking up to me. It was the two youngest ones out of the bunch, one about 4 years old, the other maybe 8 or 9 years old. They both came up and the older one said, “Sir, we’re really sorry for being so loud earlier. We won’t do it again.” I was literally genuinely shocked, especially since this was coming from the two youngest kids (and I know their parents didn’t make them come apologize, because they didn’t really seem to give a rat’s ass about anything other than their popcorn and cell phones). I told the kid that it was okay and as they were walking away I said, ” Hey…thank you both for apologizing to me,” to which they nodded and then reentered their theater. Honestly, it was amazing. I never would have expected that of anyone, much less two small kids.

Perhaps there is hope for us after all.