New Job

Good news! I got a job. Bad news! I cannot escape the vortex of fun and fulfillment that is the movie theater concession stand. Five years, people. Five years I have spent filling drinks and serving popcorn and making change. I'm good at change. I scoff at register aids.

On my first day of work the manager wanted to show me how to use the popcorn machine. I look over and it wasn't just a similar model - it was the exact same one that I had been using for all this time. Apparently there is only one industrial popcorn-making vendor in the biz. It even had that lame 'cornditioner' button. That made me happy.

Everyone there is really nice to me, and going to work is like being at a United Nations of cinema - we have people from Peru, the Dominican Republic, Ethiopia, Haiti, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and more that I just can't remember right now. There was this incredibly cute boy working door on Saturday who gave me his copy of the Village Voice in exchange for my Time Out New York. Literacy! Yesterday, I learned two interesting tidbits about him: first, he's attending a special music school to be a professional tenor, and secondly, he's sixteen years old. Ohh... hm. Yeah. So now he's a hypothetically gay underage stunningly attractive coworker. This is adversity, y'all.

Oh - another interesting tidbit - he lives on 96th street on the West Side. So he's like my neighbor, too.

Going back to the work for a second, I'm very glad that I'm there. The customers are all eighty year old rich women who go to the movies at 11:00 in the morning. However, they are not the crotchety old people of yore who would complain to me about every little thing, for the most part. We have a tip box on the counter and when I saw that I was like, "pfffffffft, no one tips at the movies, it's like the Golden Rule". NOT TRUE! We split the tip box between the two concession workers at the end of the shift. Friday, I made $6. Saturday, $7. Yesterday.... $11. Amazing!

At Carmike we weren't even allowed to accept tips. I remember vividly this kind of creepy guy in his mid-fifties who tried to tip me $5 and how I had to choke back the bile and tell him politely that company policy dictates that employees are not allowed to accept gratuities.

And instead of just the standard popcorn-soda-candy fare, we have a wide selection of pastries that are delicious. We get the shipment in on Fridays from this bakery in Brooklyn and I sample the broken bits. In addition, there are four different kinds of sandwiches, two cakes, and coffee, tea, and a cappucino/espresso machine. We treat you right at the LPC.

Which leads me to the next point - thanks be to the gods that I am not working in some lame multiplex with three screens of Fast and Furious 4 next to some other dumb movie. It's six screens, so already there is a limit, and it's all independent films, which means that the rowdy idiotic patron ratio is lowered.

OH, but there was this older woman that bought some ruggelach the other day. She seemed very high strung, but not out of the ordinary until she started talking about how high strung she was. She said it was because there's a younger woman taking care of an elderly lady in the building and she smokes. I was all, "oh, yeah, that's too bad" and then this lady went way off the deep end and leaned in close and was like, "and do you know what she does? She turns tricks too! She has all these men coming in and out of the apartment". Yes. That's the most likely explanation. I said, "perhaps she just has a lot of friends?" but even as I started saying it I knew I shouldn't even bother because this woman probably loves having some drama in her life. She went on and on about what kind of person would pull these stunts in an old woman's house, blahdee blah. Unstable! She ended the conversation with, "and I know what pot smells like!". If she had a walking stick, it would have been brandished at that moment.