Okay, so you get promoted to Supervisor ahead of all your mates. Along with the position comes the responsibility…and then the pay increase. Frankly, the derisory pay (barely more than the minimum wage and below that of other large retail employers), for the multifunctionals is what drives a few of us to apply for the role of supervisor. So you pass your interview (if you have one) and get your contract – and then it hits you. Eighty pence. That is how much extra you get paid an hour. So what do they ask you to do for that extra eighty pence? Well, let’s make a list…

• Reorganise everyone to cover the large number of staff who don’t turn up. After striking off the list those staff who are sick or just don’t turn up you have to organise teams on a skeleton staff.
• Stop the staff taking too many breaks for longer than they are allowed. After cramming in everyone’s breaks – because once they arrive that is what they look forward to and take every opportunity to remind you about – you may find the time to have one yourself if you’re lucky. As staff know they can have an extra discretionary break during the day you have to absorb the moaning when they are denied it and then catch out those that try to take it anyway.
• Do the job of the previous team. Get the team to do the tasks the team from the night before didn’t do.
• Herd sheep. It’s amazing how staff disappear – especially in the screens – or just take a comfort break that lasts a very long time.
• Act as the UN. Getting certain people to work together requires certain diplomacy some people lack.
• Act like the US. There are times when jobs don’t get done or the moaning and whining is unbearable….
• Do other people’s jobs. No security officer today?
• Teach monkeys. Some guys just aren’t up to the job.
• Count Money. The manager’s job.
• Grovel to customers. Air conditioning broken down in a screen and not getting fixed till next week? You take the flack.

And the list goes on. Yo, you’re No. 1 on the floor managing a team of at least a dozen disaffected hungover popcorn monkeys with a manager stuck in an airless back-office on the radio. For 80 pence an hour. Enjoy.

Nobody visits to see films here any more.  There are only lunatics left in the asylum.

Security reports a blockage in one of the male cubicles of monumental proportions.  The mess is so bad a pair of underpants are removed.

Security are called to investigate a man talking to himself in the corridor to the screens.  He is stroking a poster advertising a new movie.  Thankfully, he is found to have a bluetooth headset for his phone. Still…

I have to ask some late teenage girls to remove themselves from the Gents toilet where they are talking to a boy.  “Can I talk to him here?” one of them asks me…..”No, you are inside the Gents toilet and blocking the door.” “Can I talk to him here then?” “Why can’t he come out of the Gents and talk to you?” I ask.  ‘Thick as shit’ I hear security mutter behind me.

One person watches the new movie Speed Racer in the screen on their own….

Want to get your cinema shut down. Easy peasy. A few simple rules.

1. Let customers smoke and have sex in your cinema. Don’t manage your team so there is no organisation on the floor and customers can break the rules.
2. Allow kids to run between screens. See above.
3. Let your duty managers hide in the cashiers office. Don’t manage your duty managers so they sit in the cashiers office listening to music when they should be on the floor.
4. Screw up your film times. Set start films so they finish after the next film is set to start.
5. Demotivate your staff so they have no pride about working there. See above. Take an age to recruit supervisors so the only one you have goes off sick with stress, too many new multifunctionals leave, teams are left on their without direction, and managers openly criticise the lack of progress – “it’s a joke.”
6. Don’t listen to your customers. Allow them to go to the Council and your Head Office and wait for your neck to go on the line.