My first job ever was a movie theater employee. I worked there for five years, which was approximately 3 years too long. I'll just run down a list of stuff that I did during my time there.
-would get bored and take brooms and shatter them over my knee, over the railings, over the tops of seats, and on one occurrence, over the back of another employee.
-would take booster seats, prop them up on the banisters overlooking the hallway below, and butt surf them down the banister.
-before they installed cameras, I would steal candy, nachos, hotdogs, pretzels, and anything else I wanted. Everybody did this, actually.
-one time, this crazy asian girl worked there and (for some reason that I can't remember) she started to throw stuff at me in the hallway behind concession. I threw some empty boxes at her, she slipped on a box, bit my leg, so I dropped a box full of soda syrup on her hand, which prompted her to go insane, start cackling maniacally, and chase me with a butler. Strangely enough, neither of us were penalized.
-I entombed an employee in soda boxes full of syrup because he wanted to sleep for a few hours without people being able to see him.
-I asked one of my managers if he would let me go home if I punched the concrete wall outside of the building. He said no, because I wouldn't be stupid enough to do that. I promptly went outside, punched the wall, and sprained a finger. He let me go home.
-I defaced posters advertising Late Night movies, most notably that of "Pink Floyd's 'The Wall.'" The manager didn't take kindly to the picture of Waldo I drew on there, along with x'ing out "Wall" in favor of "Waldo."
-One time, I ran full tilt down the hallway and dove into hollow standee of some Angelina Jolie and Antonio Banderas movie. Afterwards, I sat in there for 10 minutes because I was tired.
-similar to the instance before, I hollowed out the back of a standee and hid inside of it with a small peep hole. When an employee walked by, I tore through the front of the standee and tackled him.
-I stole two queue poles and a rope because I wanted to have a movie shrine at home. A local cop who worked at the theater saw me do it, pulled me over in the parking lot, called my manager, and instead of firing me, he just laughed at me for a solid 30 minutes.
-that same manager had this "two pole" rule when you were tearing tickets on the ticket box. Essentially, you couldn't leave the area between those two poles and go socialize with someone at guest services or back in concession. So I got bored and started playing hackey sack with the mints. After 30 minutes, there were at least 30 mints on the ground. That manager told me to pick them up. I didn't feel like it, so I kicked them all outside of the two pole zone and cited my inability to pick them up due to the rule he was enforcing on me. I got suspended for 2 weeks.
-I threw a hard rubber ball through a Rugrats: The Movie standee, creating a nice hole where Spike's crotch would have been. Write-up.
-my friend whacked me with his broom, so I chased him into a theater hallway and hurled my broom at him javelin style, barely missing a customer's face by five inches. Write-up.
-When I didn't feel like putting trash in the trash compactor, I would fling it over the fence in the back of the theater.
-I punched four holes in the break room wall. Three because I was pissed off at something. One because a new guy bet that I wouldn't do it. Subsequently, I started putting trash into the holes which prompted the rest of the staff to do the same. They ended up tearing out the wall because it smelled so bad after a few months that it was impossible to sit in there.
-shattered a small TV/VCR combo in the breakroom. Over the course of two weeks, people snapped off larger pieces of the plastic in the back. Eventually someone poured nacho cheese into the back of it and it no longer worked.
-I used to steal time cards that belonged to people I didn't like.
-They eventually put me up in projection (don't ask me why) during which I accidentally ruined 15 minutes of Harry Potter 4.
-On days when it was slow and I was in projection, I would sleep in the box office and one of the managers would run the movies for me.
-On days when I was ushering and I was tired, I simply wouldn't clean shows.
-On days when I did clean shows, if it was stupidly busy and the company had understaffed us, we would take out our frustration by throwing full sodas from the top of the auditorium down into the seats below.
-Myself and other employees would regularly take brooms and stab them into the auditorium walls, creating large pock marks everywhere.
-If the trashcan we were using was full, we would stuff trash under the screen.
-As an April Fool's joke, one of my coworkers and myself made fake movie slicks and put them up in box office in place of the real ones. The finishing touch of this prank was that there were only two openers, the manager we didn't like and a guy with multiple sclerosis, so the manager had to be the one to change them all back out. To get back at us, that manager drew up fake suspension papers. My coworker was freaking out and going out of his mind because he needed to keep a job to pay his bills. After I signed the papers, he tore them up and told us not to **** with him.
-I would regularly take 1-2 hour breaks, sometimes leaving the theater entirely.
-During the entire 5+ year span that I was there, I was late by 20-30 minutes for 90% of my shifts.
I can go on forever. Five years is a long time at a job you hate with your entire being. The sad thing is that even after all that crap, I was still one of the most dependable people there. I would screw around for hours, but still get my job done. Plus, since I was there for so long and the majority of the managers were my friends, I could get away with anything.
The funny thing is that after I quit there, I was one of the best employees working at my new job. Did nothing mischievous or against the rules.
