you rang?

i found out today that i have a nickname in the kitchens. it is lurch (as in the butler from the addams family), and the kitchen guys reportedly say the catchphrase whenever they see me coming towards the kitchen. i actually quite like the name. it's definitely better than what i get from the female bartenders, who usually call me "sweetheart" or "darling" when i talk to them. today, one of them started calling me "sweetcheeks" whenever i walked by. after the second time, i asked her to repeat herself just to confirm that my brain was not making up the situation.

is this just something that people do in the south or is she possibly interested in developing a more intimate relationship with my cheeks (which are admittedly pretty nice)?

new shorts

we have new shorts, and although this means i no longer have to listen to michael cera talk about how he hates reading, things haven't really improved. one of the new ones involves some guy talking about how he is thirty five years old and doesn't have a girlfriend before he goes on to demonstrate why he doesn't have a girlfriend. just after meeting a blind date: "i didn't bring protection, but i think i have some baggies in the kitchen." also for some reason, this short has spanish subtitles. i don't know who this guy thinks is watching his movie, but i am relatively certain that no spanish speaking person has been inside the theater at any point. on the plus side, i now know the spanish word for "queef" (or at least what this guy thinks it is).

then there's another short where some mafia dudes take a guy to a warehouse and he says, "don't fuckin kill me. please don't fuckin kill me" for three solid minutes before they fuckin kill him.

i frequently feel the urge to apologize to the customers and i am told that the servers often do.

christian music

the guys in the kitchen all love primus so i thought they might like shellac also. tonight i put on 1000 hurts and within seconds was confronted by this beefy dude who spends all of his time wearing a bad religion shirt. top serious. i can't figure out what he actually does. anyway, he threatened to fight me for "putting on christian music." confused, i gave him a blank look. after a few seconds, i figured out that he was being serious and so i continued to give him a blank look.

it's cute that someone who identifies as a "punk" doesn't know who steve albini is.

wormhole

ok let me start this off by saying that it constantly amazes me what people will do when the lights are off.

sure there are the standard pda makeout couples, but that's to be expected and totally unremarkable. even when it is remarkable (eg. the chunky couple in matching leather jackets or the lady giving her dude a handje) it's fun and relatively harmless. if people want to order food and then wrap themselves around each other before it arrives, i'm not gonna judge them. actually, i quite enjoy those people, because i get to make them feel uncomfortable. usually, i'll walk up straightfaced and announce what i've got for them, waiting until i am acknowledged before putting it down. if their hands are engaged when i show up, i wait for them to take the food from me instead of putting it down. the people are usually mortified; it's delightful.

it's the people who do inappropriate, selfish things without giving me an opportunity to embarrass them that piss me off.

the stashers, for example, are people who order our really expensive food and then instead of eating it, hide it (or bits of it) underneath or behind their seats. the groomers (who i first observed tonight) are people who trim their nails or tweeze nose hairs or floss in the theater instead of in the privacy of their homes. then there are the aptly named dickheads. these are the people who just dump whatever they don't like on the floor in front of them. sandwiches, beer bottles, condiment cups. you name it, they plop it down with a splat or a crash with nary a thought for who'll have to clean it up.


if there was any justice in the world, we'd have one of these set up in the floor:

robespierre

today i overheard the guy who exposed lockheed martin tell a coworker that maximilien robespierre (la dictateur sanguinaire himself) was one of his personal heroes. he also claimed that the frenchman invented democracy.

is robespierre the che guevara of the 18th century?

sorority row

here is another in what may or not become a series of reviews for movies i have not seen. this review will be slightly better informed than the last one because although i have again only seen a couple two minute chunks, i did talk with a coworker who watched the last thirty minutes. i don't know why she did this, she doesn't know why she did this, but it happened and we all need to come to terms with it.

ok. basic plot summary: as you might have gathered from the title, there are sorority girls. one of them gets cheated on by her boyfriend (as sorority girls in movies are wont to do) and her friends decide to play a prank on him. one of the friends seduces the perfidious boyfriend and simulates a seizure mid-coitus. the guy freaks out, and the sorority girls (who are all taking their friend's death very calmly) drive to the woods to dispose of the body. the girls let it go on too long and, not noticing that the guy is in a frenzy, suggest (again very calmly) dismembering the body. the decidedly not calm guy picks up a tire iron and well... she wakes up, there is lots of screaming, etc. because there is a big hole in her chest, she actually dies and her friends chuck her in a well. later on other people start to die. according to my coworker, there is a twist ending, but i didn't ask what it was. i am hoping the twist is that the director comes onscreen, apologizes for making the movie, and promises not to do it again.

well, this was more a plot summary than a review; but hey, there isn't much substance to analyze. in fact, there isn't really anything to say about this movie. it is no more offensive or mindless than the hundreds of other movies out there with the same plot and extremely similar characters. so i guess my biggest problem with the movie isn't so much that someone made it as it is that the theater decided to screen it (which means i have to see parts of it). it is heartening though that although tonight was opening night, the only people in the theater for the first dinner set were two elderly couples.

bafflement

one of the many glamorous responsibilities i have is keeping the parking lot clear of refuse. beer bottles, downed tree limbs - you name it, i pick it up. you get the idea. i am trusting that you get the idea.

anyway, yesterday while i was out there, i noticed a man sitting in a little red geo. this would be perfectly ordinary of course (sitting in one's car is a totally unremarkable activity) except for one thing, that thing being that instead of exiting his car upon arrival in the theater parking lot, he continued to sit in it. i was only outside for half an hour, but he sat there the entire time. he didn't have anything to read. he was not playing music. the windows were up and his motor was off, so the ac must've been as well.

at first i thought he might be waiting for a movie to start, but i discarded that because we have a cozy bar inside with chairs and couches and his car must have been extremely uncomfortable (it was 90 degrees and quite humid at the time). well, after i finished up and went inside, i mentioned there was a guy sitting in the parking lot to one of the servers and she described him down to the white reed richards wings in his hair. it seems this guy is there all the time. in fact, when i went out to clear the lot in the evening (people love dumping trash outside the theater), he was still there. stranger still, there were others: a lady in a green hatchback, a middle-aged guy sitting in his midlife crisis, both of them behaving just like the first man. all three stayed in their cars while i was cleaning, but were gone when i left at the end of the night.

no one at work seems to have an explanation for this behavior. so i call on you, my loyal reader(s), to explain these people's deal.

because it baffles the hell out of me.

rocky

all the food we serve has a cute movie-themed nickname. blts are fried green blts, the pizza with chicken and banana peppers is a chicken run, etc. most of the time when i bring people their food, i describe it rather than using the nickname because a lot of them seem random and people often know what they wanted but forget the dumb name the theater has chosen for it. sometimes though:

- hi. did you have the philly?
- uh uh.
- are you sure? you didn't have a philly cheese steak?
- no. i ordered the rocky.
- yeah that's the philly cheese steak.
- no, no. i had the rocky.

ad nauseum.

there are actual not-fake people out there who do not recognize thorough descriptions of the food that ten minutes prior they asked their server to bring to them. in fact, there are a lot of them. that particular not-fake person refused to believe that the food i had brought to her was the food she had ordered until i tracked down a menu and pointed out the bit on it that says "rocky" and the bit directly below that where it says philly cheese steak.

if chris farley were still alive, i'd give him a tack hammer and he'd just go to town on these people.

photo shoot

tomorrow, corporate headquarters is sending over a team of photographers to take photos for the company website. i'm not sure of the details, but i do know that we, the employees, will be shown both doing our jobs and posing as the public enjoying the movies. i guess corporate is hoping that people will just see hip, young people having a good, sexy time watching movies and hanging out at the bar, and not question why those people are all wearing the same shirt.

i will provide more details tomorrow night if anything interesting happens. oh. and when important people see photos of me and i become internet famous i promise we can still be friends (until i meet better people).

-----------------------------------update--------------------------------------

nothing interesting happened.

we did get free drinks though which was nice. the lady from the corporate office wanted to showcase the variety of drinks we offer, so she said we could have beer. unsurprisingly, by allowing us to have beer she ensured that there would be no variety.

shorts

the theater shows short movies before and after showings to keep customers entertained and docile. the shorts, however, are uniformly terrible and i believe the only reason people put up with them is because they eliminate the need for conversation. if i was in charge of choosing the films, i'd show something good like werner herzog eats his shoe. unfortunately, this responsibility is one of many that i do not have, and so the theater screens garbage.

there's one where a girl talks about how transcendently wonderful post-it notes are. she must be angling for an endorsement deal because she says the phrase "post-it" 48 times in just under five minutes (i counted). the twist in the story is that one day she cannot remember where relevant post-its are and is mildly inconvenienced. in a different short, a woman is depressed on her birthday because she has turned thirty and works in a restaurant, but feels better when her mother calls and points out that she has a horse.

but my absolute favorite is the short entitled "snapshots from the american wasteland" (i am not joking with you even a little about this title 100% top serious). it is a montage of black and white photographs set to gloomy, brooding music. as you might expect, the photos display images of corruption and hubris, and are clearly meant to be provocative and meaningful (spoiler: they aren't). there are photos of the twin towers, barren fields and derailed trains, and a nice little juxtaposition between photos of impoverished children and laughing plutocrats.

the best part though is the soundtrack. the director has clearly found an older sibling's copy of f♯a♯∞ and decided to make a music video. the audio he uses is the spoken word intro from the first track of the album. so not only is he making a fake, dumb statement, he is making the same fake, dumb statement that a big group of canadian weirdos made fifteen years ago.

when he gets to ninth grade and reads the great gatsby, it's gonna blow his mind.

every person is a dick

i found out today that four coworkers with whom i regularly interact have names that are different from what i have been calling them. so i have been calling four people the wrong thing for nearly a month and no one said anything - not even the misnamed.

this happened because every person is a dick.

trachea

a guy found steel wool in his burger today. or more accurately, a paramedic found steel wool inside a guy’s trachea today. what the guy actually found was himself, on the floor, after a successful resuscitation attempt. he didn’t die, which is good. it would have been bad if he had died.