Practical Penumbra

Just your typical Saturday night.....

I don't know why I am blogging when I should be sleeping---has anyone told the Surgeon General about this blogging phenomenon?
It could be a health hazard or something.....

Anyway, second day of hell down, 8 to go. As they seem to be getting more hellish, I am not sure I'm going to survive. Tonight, for example, a trainee spilled pop on one of our (two) cash registers and killed it. Dead. Well, first it rang up a lot of merchandise when no one had pushed any buttons, and then it began this banshee-like "error" tone that rivaled the tornado alert sirens, and nothing would make it stop--I even turned it "off" and it kept wailing. So finally we unplugged it. And turned it on its side to let the pop drain out of it. And later when we plugged it back it in, it didn't screech---because all the programming was gone. So one cash register was brain dead on a Saturday night just before the highly popular 7pm shows---things just couldn't be any worse could they?

Yeah, right. Ever tried to manage a movie theater on a Saturday night with only one concession register open and one of your employees stuck on the roof?

Didn't think so.

See, there was this little girl who threw her shoe up on the roof of the theater. Or somebody else threw the shoe--I never did get that part straight. All I know is I had just come down stairs from threading the 7 and 7:15 movies with what I hoped was a workable plan to have the more experienced concession person and the back up person alternate ringing up customers on the one working register while the trainee got the popcorn and sodas (and was to keep them FAR from the working register), when the cashier breezed past me saying that she and Matt (the more experienced concession person) were going to get a little girl's shoe off the roof and would be right back. Since the projection booth has a trap door to the roof, that seemed to make sense to me at the time, so I went to cover the ticket booth for a minute. Five minutes. Ten minutes. I was selling tickets like crazy. The concession line was backed out the door and starting to be indistinguishable from the ticket line. Where was my cashier?

Then I heard her voice. She was talking to the trainee, trying to explain to him where we keep the ladder. I called her over.

Apparently our roof has two levels, and the little girl's shoe was on the lower one. Matt jumped down to it, tossed the little girl her shoe, and then couldn't get back up the seven foot wall to the level where the trap door is. So the cashier wanted the trainee to take our ladder upstairs, up a ladder to the trap door, through to the roof, and lower the ladder to the lower roof so Matt could climb up....while we had customers lined up to the street. Nope. No way, Jose.

I sent the cashier back to the concession stand to help the back-up person and the trainee wait on the customers as quickly as possible while I kept selling tickets. I couldn't even spare anyone to tell Matt what was going on. The poor guy spent 45 minutes stuck on the roof of the theater! When the crowd finally started thinning, the cashier and the trainee went to get the ladder, and a customer came up to the concessions and said "Did you know there's a guy on your roof?"

I can't wait to see what tomorrow has in store for me....

Posted by Susie at June 8, 2003 01:08 AM | TrackBack