When I worked at the Mayan Theatre, I got really sick of was things breaking and constantly having to be repaired. The building was sixty years old and much of the concession and projection equipment had been around for awhile. Sometimes, they were things we could repair ourselves. Other times, it couldn't be repaired and we had to get outside help. So, I was really looking forward to running a brand-new theatre. I figured that great care would be taken to ensure that we had all the newest stuff and nothing would need to be repaired. As usual, I was wrong. SO VERY WRONG.
We had gotten the Grand Opening celebration for the Hillcrest Cinemas out of the way on 11/21/91. The next day was Friday and there was so much more work to be done. Crews still had to install the screens in auditoriums #4 and #5. The concession stand needed to be stocked and equipment needed to be installed. At this point, Ved said, "Oh, I wish we had waited until the day before Thanksgiving to open. That would have given us five more days." But the thing was, even if we had those five more days, the construction crew would have just gone slower and we'd still be facing these same issues that day instead.
We were supposed to open at 4:30pm for shows that began at 5pm. We had about 50 people lined up outside the box office. Every couple of minutes after 4:30, we'd ask, "Can we open?" And the answer was always, "NO!" At around 4:45pm, we finally got a "YES!" That was quickly followed by, "Wait! NO!" Five minutes later, they let us open up. People came in, we tore their tickets and most of them walked right past the concession stand to get into the auditoriums. That meant we lost literally hundreds of dollars in our opening just because we couldn't get our act together and open in time for people to buy popcorn.
Because our staff hadn't been trained beforehand, all the House Managers and some of the District Managers had to work behind the concession stand because our people just didn't know what to do. This presented a real problem when it came to the espresso machine. On our menu, we had four and ONLY four espresso drinks listed: Espresso, Cappuccino, Cafe Latte and Iced Cappuccino. However, people kept ordering drinks that we didn't have listed. The House Managers and District Managers, who knew how to make those drinks, would just go ahead and make them. Of course, this would cause problems later on when those same people return and expect to be able to get the same kind of drink.
We got through the night, but Saturday would be the real test because we weren't going to have all those Managers working behind the concession stand. Of course, we had a couple of disasters. One person sat down in a chair in one of the auditoriums and it broke. He came out to complain, but he had some kind of anxiety attack when the staff was trying to find out where the seat was, if he wanted a refund and all this other information. I came down after the incident. I was told he went outside and grumbled about this being a brand new theatre. One of the employees said he probably wasn't going to come back. I said, "Oh, no. We're going to hear from him on Monday." We went in, found the chair and put some tape on it to keep someone else from sitting there. On Monday, he did call and talk to Anz. He told her about how everyone was yelling at him and asking him questions. I guess she game him a pass or something.
We also had a projection problem on Saturday. We were showing "Life is Sweet," and one of the projectionists didn't thread the film right, so he wound up scratching the print. We wouldn't be able to get a new print until the next week. This meant we had to dissuade people from going to see that film. Great, more money lost.
We finally got our staff trained and operating smoothly after the first weekend. I didn't like the trial by fire, but it helped to bond everyone as a team. And some of the employees who participated out in the final construction phase took a kind of pride in the theatre because they felt like they had helped to build it.
I thought after that, I wouldn't have much to worry about and could concentrate on being a manager. But then we started having issues with little things. Because we were having maintenance issues, Anz put me in charge of fixing everything. I felt like I was being forced to deal with the issues she didn't want to waste time on. I preferred working as a manager during shifts, not as her personal slave.
But I shouldn't have had to do all of this maintenance because everything was supposed to be new. However, I found out later that the people in charge of buying the supplies had a tendency to get everything really cheap. After a couple of months, we were having problems with the door handles. The screws that connected the handles on each side of the doors were very brittle and broke very easily. I found that by going through and tightening the handles with an allen wrench, they didn't break. But this wasn't until after we broke several of them. I went to a hardware store in Downtown San Diego to see if they could order parts for us. They researched and found that these door handles had been declared obsolete, so we couldn't order parts. And there was nothing we could order that was compatible. We didn't have any spare parts, so we had to pull the handles from doors that we didn't use very often. I continued to go around to all the doors every two weeks to tighten the handles.
And a separate issue we had with the handles was the handicapped bathrooms. The person installing the handles explained that there was this little switch under the latch for privacy. What he didn't explain was that when the switch was in the "off" position, it would go into the "on" position anytime someone locked the deadbolt. This meant that someone could come in, lock the door and use the bathroom. They would be able to leave, but the next person who wanted to use that bathroom couldn't get in because it was locked and a key was required to open it back up. And if you opened it with a key and turned the switch off, the person using the bathroom next would lock the deadbolt and put the switch back on. I COULD NOT IMAGINE THIS BEING AT ALL USEFUL FOR A PUBLIC RESTROOM! The person who installed this was long gone by the time we found out this flaw so we couldn't replace it with another mechanism. I was able to "fix" the problem by covering the latch with tape. People could still lock the deadbolt and the door could be opened by the next person who wanted to use it. However, it looked really tacky to have this large, noticeable piece of tape on a virtually brand-new door.
Another issue we had to solve was mice. Even though it was a brand new building, we had a minor infestation. It was presumed that they arrived in one of the boxes delivered to the theatre. We managed to capture one with a glue trap and thought that was the only one. Then, we would find droppings in the popcorn bin. That meant we'd have to toss out 50 pounds of raw popcorn. One day, I opened a register door and saw a mouse scurry out the back. It fell into a trash can underneath. I pulled out the lining with the mouse inside, took it up to Anz and asked, "Can we keep it?" She didn't like that very much. Abed and I put the mouse in an empty butter container, closed the lid and threw it down the garbage chute.
Then we had a problem with the concession sink. Water was coming out from the faucet where it wasn't supposed to. The fix was simple. All we had to do was replace the washer. After awhile, that didn't work, so we decided to replace the faucet. I went to a restaurant supply store to order the part. However, I found out that THIS faucet was obsolete, so I would have to install a different faucet. If I didn't know anything about door handles, I knew even less about plumbing. However, with some help from the people at Home Depot and me monkeying around with it, I was able to install the new faucet and it looked like a pro had done it. I was actually proud of myself.
And then we had issues with the paint. There was supposed to be plenty of paint left over from the construction so that we could touch a few things up if we needed to. However, we found out that the construction crew, in an effort to create more space, had taken all the paint and MIXED IT TOGETHER! Wait, we were paying these guys $15 an hour and they did this? Of course, these were the same people who were told to get rid of the trash, so they took it outside and threw it all from the second floor into a pile in the courtyard. Our own employees then had to clean that up.
And I was also stressed out from the nights that I was managing. The first couple of months, I was never able to leave until 2am. This was due to the fact that the staff never really fully grasped how they were supposed to close, count inventory and their money. I took matters in my own hands. I just took the drawers from concession and the box office when we closed, counted the money myself and prepared the deposit. After that, I was always able to leave at midnight. But Anz didn't like that I was counting their money and told me to stop. I told her that I would give the employees a certain amount of time to finish inventory and come up and count the money. If they didn't finish at the time expected of them, I would go ahead and count it and get the deposit ready because I couldn't stay there until 2am every night. Honestly, I wasn't getting paid enough for that.
After I had written a letter to Anz expressing my frustration with working there, she admitted that she didn't like being thrust into a situation in which she didn't have complete control. She was referring to me being her Assistant Manager. We both lamented the working relationship we had at our old theatres and how this was just wasn't close to being like those. She and her old Assistant Manager had great chemistry and could finish each other's sentences. I'm actually guessing that what happened is that Maud talked to Anz before we met and warned her about her misguided perceptions of me, mainly that I wasn't smooth with people. This likely caused Anz' guard to go up anytime I was around.
But even though we had this little heart-to-heart talk about how our expectations weren't being fully realized, nothing changed. And I wound up doing something about that, and it was pretty drastic.
I'll get into that tomorrow.
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