My Job

I just read through Zosia's blog about her crazy boss and it occurred to me that I haven't posted any work stories. I must be the only one.
This is not to say nothing blog worthy happens at my work, I just work late shifts and then forget to blog the next day.

So, I work at a cinema and it's in a suburb filled with, for lack of a more PC term, wogs. There are many hoons who "pimped their rides" and girls who seem to have been pimped also. Everyone lives in huge houses and pays for popcorn with $50 notes.

There are 5 jobs in a cinema:
-Candy Bar (selling over priced popcorn and lollies and so forth, then cleaning up the mess people have made on the tiles with their $5.60 Coke)
-Floor (checking tickets, directing people to cinemas and toilets and then cleaning the aforementioned)
-Box Office (selling tickets. It's a pretty sweet deal, they even get to sit down all day)
-Supervising (sitting in the office and making sure everyone else does their job)
-Projectionist (turning the movies on)

I do the first two. When I have proven myself to be reliable and conchy (and more available for weekday shifts) I will also do Box Office.

There aren't as many of the crazy characters that Zosia gets but there are one or two:
- Crazy football fan who literally never stops talking (and you can guess how varied those conversation topics are too)
- Slightly erratic woman who has been doing this job for 30 years, at this same cinema and always works the same shifts (she has been nominated for Employee of the Month once. By herself.)
- Two male supervisors who hold long conversations akin to bitching about the only other male supervisor (I like them both though, very entertaining and don't seem to mind of you don't fulfill all the 7 Steps of Customer Service)
- Battle-axe supervisor who has banned coffee on several occasions and puts up notices on the staff notice board in all caps.

I'm not very good at thinking up nicknames though so I'm open to suggestions.

PS: the 'Wall-E' standee I mentioned in the sidebar is this:

Isn't it cool? You actually sit on it too and lots of customers have had their photos taken with it. (Yes, people take cameras to cinemas now too)

Soapies

Those of you who read both our blogs may have noticed that I made reference to a show called Passions in my sister's blog. It is my favourite soap opera ever in the whole world although these days I don't get to see as much of it because I have study and a faux social life which dominates my day time TV time but my gap year should put at end to that first problem at least.
Anyway, I just have to share the joy that is Passions with you all:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HB8LHegCia0

Oh yes, there is magic and a blind priest and lava and living dolls and a few years ago they opened a portal to Hell in Charity's closet but she didn't die there and two witches had a battle and the less evil witch was saved by her doll who is now dead and replaced with another doll and they brought Charity back which was lucky because the priest was almost out of holy water that he'd been throwing at the closet and then no one believed Kay when she told people she'd helped the witch put Charity in Hell because she was jealous of her and they both wanted to marry the same guy who was already married and he didn't know because he was at a big party that everyone in the town was invited to except Charity, Kay, the priest, the witches and some nerdy guy who was supposed to be Kay's best friend but wasn't around in any previous episodes and he saw the Hell portal and stll though Kay was making it up.

The 18th

A lot of people dressed up and I was happy (I take dressing up very seriously). Here are a couple of piccies I'd like to share:






(That's me in the last one, reaching for a present. I like to think the collective sexiness of emo has gone up a notch thanks to that party)

It’s Sunday and I have many homeworks to do. This is my journey of procrastination:

11:52 am:
I was just overcome by a sudden urge to get lots of brown paper bags and fill them with pretty things for someone to come across on a later date.

11:56 am:
Couldn’t find any pretty things to put in the paper bags so I filled an envelope with staples and old reciepts.

12:02 noon:
Paced around my room for a while, discovered my box of Birthday choccies was empty so opened a packet of Sour Strips (cola flavour). Currently pondering the question ‘Why do cola flavoured lollies taste more like cola than Coca-Cola does?’
Not that I have tasted straight cola on its own but I can be quite certain that these cola flavoured lollies have their own distinct flavour whereas Coke just tastes like fizzy sugar. (I discovered that at work last night when drinking a mysterious fizzy drink in an opaque cup with an equally opaque lid and was unable to work out what I was drinking until I peeked.)

12:16 pm:
Followed the acting trail of Val Lehman on IMDb.com

12:40 pm:
Just been looking through blog archives (mine and others’)

12:55 pm:
Highlighted stuff in my SATAC guide.

(short interlude for lunch break)

3:26 pm:
I’ve opened some more books and sent some emails and read some more blogs and just remembered that I promised to tell you all about my party.
I’ll do that in my next post.

My adventure at the Bottle-O

I’ve seen Zosia do this before and there doesn’t seem to be any trick to it. She goes in, picks up a few bottle, puts them back, picks up some more bottles and buys them. Easy.

I needed to buy some champagne, beer and rum for my party (the rum is for punch and when I saw that, it made me think of pirates).
I went straight to the wine section to have a look around and was struck with a problem: secretive bottles. That’s right, bottles that refused to tell me what was in them. Now, I’m not completely out of the loop when to comes to booze and I know that ‘champagne’ is no longer the correct word so I knew to look for bottles with the words ‘sparkling white’ on them. Do you think I could find any? No!

After around 15 minutes of wandering around in a circle with my granny trolley (I wasn’t planning to walk home carrying a whole Saturday night’s worth of bottles unless I could wheel them somehow) when I eventually sent a text for help to my sitsas. “tell me about savy champagne, is it any good?” This is because I had finally found a bottle with ‘sparkling’ written on it!

The response from Zosia “never heard of it, so probably not. Try omni or jacob’s creek’ which I did (try, that is) and couldn’t seem to find them. AD is a little less into texting and cut straight to a call which went a little something like this:
AD: So what’s the problem?
NG: I can’t find any champagne and I think the bottle-o staff are laughing at me!
(not exactly a paranoid thought since I’d been wandering around for 20 minutes with a lost expression and an empty granny trolley)
AD: OK, where are you?
NG: (a slight whimper) In the wine section.
AD: (soothingly) Go to the fridges along the wall and look on the bottom shelves …

That’s right, dear readers, my first trip to the bottle-o as an 18 year old and I need my sister who lives in another state to guide me to the champagne.
Mum asked me later why I hadn’t asked for her help beforehand and I suppose it was because silly me thought the bottles would tell me what was inside them! But I’ve learnt my lesson now; alcohol is designed to confuse.