Enjoy The Film

Lying on the sofa drinking as much coffee as I can physically manage to get up and brew, I casually notice through the patio windows that Summer has arrived. Dazed from an exceptionally late night on the job, confused what to do with my precious few hours before I am back cranking up my smile for the customers, I casually notice the room is becoming littered with dead but uneaten flies. The cat is getting more out of this Summer than I am.

For the casual football fan it is a graveyard time of the year. Bizarrely, there is club rugby league on the radio, interspersed with that preamble to the start of the new football season, the Olympics, a smog ridden affair promoting twenty-first century Mao-ism: whatever you can do, we can make our workers do it better – and quicker But can we have your best creative heads because we don’t encourage free thinking over here). Batman did make a brief appearance in Hong Kong, free running into skyscrapers. But as the Far East churns out ever more HD players, China still doesn’t get how many helicopters one needs to capture the caped crusader in mid-air, so we can watch him on those Sony Playstation blu-ray players.

And does he draw in the crowds. Whilst the ladies are singing Money, Money, Money in the aisles of Mamma Mia, the gentlemen are swerving the punches in The Dark Knight. Yes, we are finally sold out. And we don’t what to do about it. The beauty of unallocated seats is that most of the time we save a lot of time and effort in letting the customer be in charge of where they want to watch the movie. But tonight, in between catching those naughty members of the travelling community canoodling yet again in the exclusive boxes, we have sold out in two of our screens. Policy is not to sell the last 20 seats as no one wants to sit with their face in the screen. We execute Operation Torch with Mamma Mia; I stand outside the screen at the door with my over large industrial torch explaining to customers they will be allocated a seat, my colleague is inside negotiating with them where it is. It works until the film actually starts and a group of nine ladies all dressed to the nines turn up – that’s their night out ruined.

Next up is the Dark Knight and Box Office screw up and sell all the tickets. The film starts and I have two groups kicking off in the screen as its full bar the front row. No one sits there and they get refunded. Over on the main screen Operation Queue works perfectly as we get customers to wait in a line while the screen is cleaned. Once the cleaners are out I let customers in. But the cleaners start up a conversation at the door and I shout at them to get out of the way. At that very moment some bloke with Nachos (ignoring the 100 people in the queue) walks in front of me.

“They are all gonna kick off when they come out and I am going to be cashing up.” Yeh, right. ‘Cos that’s what’s managers do isn’t it? The fan breaks down in Mamma Mia, so no air conditioning, and its baking. It’s a full screen and we have a potential female-driven riot on our hands. And the manager is not going to make himself available for any one. He is majorly pissed off at having to make up nachos earlier. So at the moment the screen empties I crack on with recording damages round the back out of sight. As a hundred dripping women file out I only have a couple of complaints to deal with. Apart from a Health and Safety Consultant giving me grief (respect to her 10 year old son who told her to ‘cut me a little slack’) we escaped the worst. Why the manager did not stop the previews and warn customers he only knows. He mumbles something about customers choosing to stay in the screen. Standing at the back of the empty screen afterwards I reckon a lot of women will have cancelled their visit to the sauna the next day.

Tags: TheDark Knight, Mama Mia, air conditioning