When one is looking for a service job, there are a few things you try to look for to make the whole thing tolerable. You hope for decent pay, a good work environment, and if possible, giving a crap about what you're doing. That happened to me when I got a job at the Carmike Cinemas over the summer. I knew if I had to work a, let's be honest here, a dead end job, I at least wanted someplace where I'd get good perks.
The Carmike had a lot of good things going for it. For one, it was a very casual job for the most part. If it meant hanging in the box office printing out tickets all day. Sometimes you have so much down time, that I could just bring in books to pass the time. I would never complain about being paid to read.
Or you're on floor staff and you have to sweep up theaters, but it's so little work you can usually just hang around. Better yet, sometimes, a theater doesn't let out for cleaning for a half hour, so it's possibly to just walk into a theater playing a movie you've been itching to see. Then you just hang out there until you're called into sweeping duty again. It's pretty nice. For all the times I went into Captain America: Civil War and Suicide Squad to watch disjointed parts of those movies, it probably equaled to about a couple viewings of each movie.
The best part of the job though, were the perks. People who worked at the Carmike were allowed to see free movies on their days off and given free popcorn and drinks. I absolutely exploited these privileges. I managed to see a couple movies on days I shouldn't have. As long as managers didn't see, I was in the clear. With the popcorn and drinks, we were only allowed to get certain sizes for free, and only popcorn and drinks were free. Luckily, the employees of the Carmike generally had a "Screw Management" vibe, so literally EVERYTHING was free. That meant free candy and free whatever sized drinks. I lived it up over the summer.
All of this was amazing. But this was a summer movie theater job. So it wasn't the best thing in the world. There were plenty of downsides. as well. The first one being that pay was total crap. It was 7.25 an hour. So I wasn't really raking it in. It was also not worth the long days I would have to work.
While I had plenty of positives to working on floor, that job is pretty much "clean up garbage." So it wasn't the best job to have there. Especially when you would leave pretty much smelling like trash and wanting to tear your clothes off.
I haven't even mentioned working in concession. That was easily my least favorite position at the Carmike. That had the most running around of all the jobs. The customers were easily at their rudest at the concession stand. To top it all off, as great as movie theater popcorn is, it loses it's charm fast after the butter smell sticks to your clothes, no matter how often you wash them. The popping machine also makes it very easy to burn your hands, and that's the absolute worst.
In the end, the bad started to outweigh the good. As soon as college started back up, the amount of time I was there wasn't worth the low pay, and it was getting harder to take advantage of the perks. So I promptly gave them my two weeks and got out of there. We left on good terms. But like the age old tale says, the longer you spend time with someone, the more you see how imperfect they are.
