So my working relationship with Anz at the Hillcrest Cinemas wasn't going too well. It seemed like all she wanted to do was make my job harder and harder. However, I was always able to rise to her challenges. But then she would raise the bar higher. I really felt like she was trying to make me quit so that she could promote an Assistant Manager more to her liking. And I'm willing to bet that once she did that, she was not going to make that person jump through a bunch of hoops and take care of the maintenance.
The thing was that I still loved the job. I enjoyed managing shifts and working with the employees and customers. I refused to let her get in the way of that. I would come in every day and be the best manager I could be. But I was not being properly rewarded for putting in all that effort. About a year after the theatre opened, I requested consideration for a raise. While the review by Anz was decent, my raise came out to $15 a week. That meant $780 extra for the year, or $65 a month average. It wasn't much of a raise, not to mention that I typically worked about 60 hours a week.
This wouldn't have been so bad, except that we had a Chief of Staff named Lyd who would manage some shifts. She was a good worker, but she had a tendency to take too long to close up the Saturday matinee shift. She was supposed to have everything done before she hit the eight-hour mark, but always, ALWAYS took about an hour an a half extra to get the deposit over to the bank. Then, she requested and got a raise of 75 cents an hour. That amounted to $30 a week, based on a 40-hour week. That was double my raise and even more than that because she was getting overtime. I complained to Anz about her running into overtime every week, but she didn't take any immediate action.
Added to this was a deposit Lyd made that "vanished." The bank did not acknowledge receiving it. Anz told me she suspected that Lyd and her boyfriend at the time (who worked at the Guild Theatre down the street) just kept it, but she couldn't prove anything.
Around this time, there was a major change in my life. It will be the subject of several posts in the future, but understand that I was having problems with both my home life and my work life. I felt that the main solution to these problems was that I HAD to have more money. So I resorted to something I thought I would never ever do: I started stealing from my workplace.
I am not going to go into detail about how I pulled this off, but suffice it to say that I was clearing about $100 a week. This was what I felt I needed to be where I wanted to be financial-wise. (The truth is that I could have stolen $500 a week and it still wouldn't have been enough, but Anz and Ved would have noticed that much money missing.) This went on for about three months and the money I stole got spent nearly as quickly as I took it.
Then Anz and Ved set up a trap. Fortunately, it wasn't meant for me. They put an extra $10 in petty cash before one of Lyd's shifts. When Anz came in that night, she found that the extra $10 had been taken. She and Ved immediately fired Lyd. Lyd swore up and down that she didn't take the extra money, but wasn't able to offer a reasonable explanation for who did. When I ran into Lyd a few years later, she said that the woman we had been training to learn how to manage had admitted to taking the money. Honestly, I didn't know what to believe.
But as a result of someone having taken that $10, Anz changed the protocol for closing. From that point on, I was no longer allowed to take the drawers from the registers and count them by myself. I absolutely had to wait until the concession and box office staff had completed their inventory and count before I could get a deposit ready. Fortunately, the staff had finally gotten its act together and could finish up a lot more efficiently than they had a year before, but it still wasn't fast enough for me. There wasn't anything I could do about it. It did prevent me from being able to steal any more money.
Not long after that, the problems in my home went away and I told Anz I could rededicate myself to the theatre. Because of all my personal turmoil, I had been slacking on my responsibilities and was hoping to make up for it. However, Anz just piled on more work.
I felt like it was time to ask for another raise, even though less than a year had passed since my last one. Anz did a review in which I was supposed to rate myself on my performance and then we'd compare notes. I thought I was doing pretty well after coming back from a double-sided razor's edge. She didn't see it that way, and criticized me in every category on the review. Even the one area I knew I excelled at, attendance, wasn't even considered by her as "exceeds expectations." This was despite the fact that I always showed up at least an hour early for my shifts.
At the beginning of the summer movie season, we were showing Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of "Much Ado about Nothing." It was the kind of film that local English classes could bring students to on a field trip to learn about Shakespeare. Anz told me that a class was scheduled to come in the next day and she didn't have anyone to cover that shift. (It was supposed to be my day off.) She would need me to come in around 11:30am. Later that night, I attended a preview screening of the film "Chain of Desire." I saw Anz and asked her how many students were going to come in the next day. She said there would be about a hundred. I told her I'd see her then. As I waved goodbye, I noticed that she had a strained, worried look on her face, but I didn't think much about it.
The next morning, 07/07/93, I woke up. I did my usual daily routine of going out, getting breakfast and the newspaper. I sat in my apartment eating and reading and got ready to go to work. All morning long, I realized that I really did not feel like working that day, that for the first time in more than 3 1/2 years, I didn't feel like going. The good side was that I only had to work the afternoon shift and could leave in a few hours. As much as I bragged about my attendance earlier, I actually showed up five minutes late this particular day. It was the first time I ever arrived that late for a shift.
I came in the theatre and walked upstairs to the office. Anz was there. I asked her if the class had arrived yet. They hadn't. I asked where the other employees were who were going to be working the shift. They weren't there yet, either. Suddenly, Ved walked in and asked Anz and me to follow him to his office. His tone was very intense. We walked down the hall to his office and he closed the door behind us. I knew this was going to be pretty serious, but hoped it wouldn't take very long because I still had a shift I needed to manage.
Ved said, "Fayd, the reason we're here is because we're letting you go." I was stunned. I recall that Ved was telling me about how there had been expectations that I would eventually be a House Manager, but lately, I hadn't been measuring up. But while he was telling me all this, I had all these thoughts racing through my mind. Namely, that I had a lot of bills to pay in the aftermath of the situation that used to surround my home life. All I could think about was what I was going to do without a job or money to pay my bills and became panic stricken. And I was ANGRY at the same time. I started experiencing what I can now best describe as a neurological breakdown.
I recall Ved ending his spiel with "Onward and upward" and asking me if I had anything to say. Yes, I had plenty to say, but I was shocked at what was coming out of my mouth. Because of everything running through my brain at that moment, I... could... only... speak... one... word... at... a... time. In my head, I was thinking, "What is wrong with me? Why can't I get these words out in some kind of coherent fashion?" As hard as I tried, I could not speed up my delivery. I had to talk to them like this for the next ten minutes. To this day, Ved and Anz are the only two people who have seen me in this condition. Fortunately, I've never had as full a breakdown like that since, but I have come close a couple of times.
What I was able to get out of my mouth was how I had been completely disregarded as an Assistant Manager for the last year and half by both Ved and Anz. I told them I had been doing my job to the best of my abilities this whole time and not once did they say that I was coming close to losing my job. Ved replied with something like, "Well, that's a concern you should have brought up earlier."
At this point, I figured nothing I could say would change the situation and I was finally able to start speaking in normal tones. I asked about the possibility of filing for unemployment. Ved said that under the circumstances, I should qualify. (Honestly, he's supposed to tell me I qualify before sending me on my way.) Ved gave me my final check, which included two weeks' severance pay. I told Anz it was a rather large amount and asked if she would be able to cash it out of petty cash. She said she wouldn't. Since I didn't have a bank account at the time, that meant I would have to take it to the check cashing place across the street and lose 10% of it. That kind of made me a little upset. We all walked down to the lobby. On my way out, I shook hands with Ved and Anz without looking them in the eye. I remember Anz put no effort into the handshake. She just allowed me to move her hand up and down.
After cashing the check and going home, I thought about everything that he said. (I should add that Anz did not say one word during all of this, except to tell me she couldn't cash the check.) He didn't tell me I wasn't doing my job, just that he didn't think I had the potential to be a House Manager. As it turned out, there wouldn't be an opening for a House Manager in the next two years. Why fire me when there wasn't any immediate need for someone to step up into that role? This really didn't make any sense.
After a period of time, I came to the realization that while I didn't deserve to be fired for the reasons Ved game me, I did deserve to be discharged because I had stolen money from the theatre, for which I was never accused nor caught. A few years later, I was watching a news report about people who embezzled from their workplaces. An expert was discussing the difference between blue collar crime and white collar crime. He said that if you ask a blue collar criminal if they knew what they did was wrong, they would say "Yes." But a white collar criminal would typically say they did nothing wrong, like they were justified in taking what they felt like they were owed. That was the way I felt when I was taking the money. My situation can be compared to career criminals who get away with a lot of crimes and then complain when they go to jail for something they didn't do. Knowing that I held on to the job a few months longer than I was supposed to was rather cathartic for me. I've never stolen money from another employer since.
However, I found out some time later the likely reasons for my dismissal, and it turned out to be a conspiracy of sorts. I'll go into more detail tomorrow.
As a post-script, most people fantasize about their former workplace completely falling apart after they've been fired. I actually got to have that happen a little bit with the Hillcrest Cinemas. You may recall how I would go around and tighten all the door handles every couple of weeks to keep them from breaking. The main projectionist told me that three weeks after I left, ALL the door handles broke off. I hope that made them regret firing me just a little bit.
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