Bay City Cinemas

Well, I started my new job at the movie theater. I've worked a total of three days so far. I've worked at a theater before, so I know all the basic stuff. Although this theater is much cleaner and nicer. The picture above is the theater. One nice thing about the layout of the theater is that it has a tall "shelf" above the concession stand for all the promotional cardboard stand-ups. This way they stay out of the way and customers don't wreck them.

Day 1

Justin (one of the managers) showed me what to do when working "the floor," which includes turning on the lights, tearing tickets, theater checks, cleaning the theaters, opening & closing the doors, etc. I had never seen all the different cinemas, so he gave me a tour of those. We have a total of 8 screens; 6 main ones and two downstairs. The two downstairs are super small. And when I say small, I mean small. One only seats 25 people, the other seats 18. And they have tiny screens. After that, Sam (one of the workers) showed me what to do for the rest of the day. When trailers start showing in a theater, we usually want to close the doors then. That's my favorite part. All the doors are on this magnetic system. So I just go to the closet, flip a switch for the right door, and it automatically closes. It sounds really cool too. So the floor isn't too hard. In the mornings it's usually one floor person and one candy person. When the candy person goes on break, I have to go work the concession stand/bar. The computer system was quite similar to what I had worked with before, so I knew the basics. One weird thing here, they sell the tickets at the concession stand, I guess so people don't have to get their money out twice. Cass was working the bar my first day and showed me what to do before she went on her break. She didn't bother to teach me about vouchers because she figured no one would actually come in and buy one while she was gone. I knew how to sell tickets and candy, so I figured I was good to go. Wrong! Right after she left a woman came in and asked to buy a voucher! Luckily...or unfortunately, my boss Paul was standing right there and he was able to help me figure it out, but he wasn't too happy with Cass. Once that lady left a man came in wanted to redeem a movie voucher he received to see a movie that would be playing later that night. I had absolutely no clue how to find the movie on the computer. Sam came to my rescue and showed me that you have to scroll through a whole bunch of pages to get to movies that night. What a great way to start off. But other than that, the day went really well.

Day 2

I worked the floor again, this time all by myself. Everything started off good. I turned on all the right lights. Closed the doors at the right times. Cleaned the theaters thoroughly. Then came the delivery. Today was stock day. In came four huge pallets of candy. Since it was just me working the floor and Amanda at the bar, I was the lucky person to move everything upstairs. In our theater all the candy and soda is stored upstairs. We have a lift that we can send things upstairs to the projectionist or use for transporting the stock. So first I had to move all the boxes from the pallets and count to make sure we got everything we ordered. I started with the Skittles. I came up with 7 boxes extra?! I asked Amanada if that was normal and she said they always get the right amount. Great! I moved on to the M&Ms. Well, what do you know, 2 boxes too many. This is not looking good. Plus I didn't have a calculator, so I was multiplying and dividing on this little sheet of paper, hoping I'm doing my math right. Eventually I counted all the boxed and the plain M&M's and the peanut M&M's cancelled eachother out, but we still had too many Skittles. Now that everyting was counted I started filling the lift. The lift can only hold 300kg worth of weight. Like I have any clue how much that is. I put what looked like a good amount and started my many trips up and down the stairs. Oh yeah, one thing I forgot to mention earlier. Almost every door that staff members have to use have a key pad on them to keep nosy customers out. Which wouldn't be so bad except they all have different combinations. And I have a lot of different doors to go through. There is the door to get in the bar, the door to upstairs, the door in each theater for the cleaning supplies, the door to the garbage, and the door to the staff room. On my first day I had to stay in the staff room during my whole break because I was too afraid to go out and then forgot the combination to get back in.

Day 3

Floor again, which is fine by me. I like working the floor. Nothing too special today. Today I got to dip ice cream. New Zealanders love their ice cream. I guess it's a staple to have ice cream cones at the movies. I bet about 80% of the people I saw in my first three days bought an ice cream cone. We have two kinds, vanilla dipped in chocolate or vanilla dipped in chocolate with nuts. I went in the back and Abbie showed me how to do the nut ones today. Take a cone, dip it in the chocolate, let it dry for just a little bit, then roll it in nuts before it completely dries. Pretty simple.