My Year in Multiplex Hell

A year ago some financial constraints due to a whopping IRS bill required me to find a second job. I hit the area malls, filling out applications like I hadn't since high school. I even took the bizarre personality test that Borders Books gives, wondering exactly what they were looking for.

The only fish I managed to hook was at the local cinema, a ten-plex just outside Princeton. I had gone there hundreds of times as a customer, and figured it would be a good second job. I turned out to be right, to a point.

I was practically hired on the spot, and began as an usher, working my way up to concessionist and then box office. Working nights and weekends for $6.75 an hour, it paid for my IRS payments, and covered my car payment, as well. I also got some interesting life experience.

If I were a teenager, it would have been a great job, seeing movies for free (a job at a bookstore would have given me a discount, but not freebies) and getting a pretty flexible schedule. As an adult, though, it certainly had it's downside, particularly on days when I worked both jobs, pretty much working non-stop from 8 am to close to midnight. I felt kind of degraded by the whole thing, thinking I had certainly lived long enough to have avoided this kind of drudgery. Of course, it was a situation that I had created.

The theater where I work is owned by Regal Entertainment, a corporate monolith that is typically bureaucratic and fascistic. Though the employees are paid very little, they are treated in a crushingly dehumanizing fashion. Though the profits on concessions are astronomical, we are urged to get customers to upsize, changing their small soda, which is already too much for one normal person, into a larger one, that would comfortably accommodate a family of four. Visits by the regional manager, a humorless henchman, are like raids by the gestapo. Instead of warmly thanking the menial laborers who fund his bonus, he scowls like Scrooge, looking for misdemeanors.

Those that I work with are an interesting bunch, in a Dickensian sort of way. Most are high school or college kids, with the adults those that are somewhat in society's margin, needing two jobs to get by. Those that I got to know best include a guy with cerebral palsy who describes in great details the sex he has with girls he meets on the Internet, and a guy who is fascinated by serial killers, and may become one himself one day. I was stunned the other day to learn that he knew who Squeaky Fromme was, but not Gerald Ford.

The managers were all a pleasure to work with, minus one, a woman who was such a bizarre sociopath that she could have tied up a psychologist's couch for years. A few months ago, though, she was transferred, which had the same effect on our theater that Dorothy's house had on Munchkinland. The other managers, all guys who are on their way somewhere else, do the best they can, managing kids and disgruntled adults. They don't make nearly enough money, either.

My last day at the theater is on Saturday. I will look back on this time with a little shudder, but also some laughs, and hope that what I learned there can be put to good use in the future.