Endless Bummer

The past two days have been very difficult. Not totally unbearable, but wearisome. There are several reasons for this.

One is that we are short-staffed. There are simply not enough bodies to accomplish out mission, which in large part is managing enormous groups of people. We have, at our peak, four hundred people waiting to enter a theatre and two hundred waiting to buy tickets, as well as a handful of others who are coming and going to and from our theatre. Tom complicate matters, some people are more important than others (or at least have better access).

The other problem is that we have a wholly unprecedented number of people choosing to waitlist formovies than are more than two hours out. Normally the way the waitlist works is that two hours prior to a screening, we hand out up to two hundred numbers to people and tell them to come back and line up in order half an hour before the film starts. We are starting with groups of people in excess of two hundred, sometimes over four hundred, sometimes stretching single file over two hundred yards to the back lot of the school.

Furthermore, we have a semi-official policy - semi-official only bc it isn't published, and today I was told we are testing it - of allowing people who do not get into Film #1 to stay and become the front of the waitlist line for Film #2. This has frequently been the defacto policy and usually isn't a problem when you're talking about perhaps six people. However, in our case, we may have over a hundred people who opt to exercise this option, meaning that people who came early just to get into Film #2 are enraged that people who didn't come specifically for Film #2 are essentially being prioritized before them.

The more I think about it, in theory the process should work as long as people are just here to see films and don't care too much about which one they get into, but in practice the problem is that people do care about which films they see, and system only leads to an escalate perception of what constitutes a reasonable lead time to get in a wait list. After the experience of the past two days, it would not be unreasonable for someone to assume that they should get in line at 8 AM for a film that starts at 3:15 PM.

This in itself wouldn't be a huge issue, since it's really just event planning. Mostly I work with my fellow managers to try and assess where we can put people without causing new problems. However, while we get this figured out, we are contending with angry patrons, patrons who cut in line on each other or duck out the back of one line to enter another, and patrons who accuse one another of such behavior. I tell them to act like adults and put the onus on them, or else I feel like Pontius Pilate, patron saint of bureaucrats.

Even this behavior would be acceptable if it weren't for the mad barking of some patrons (and while the loudest are always men, they aren't always men). Yesterday I had two men in separate lines yelling at me that a third line had arrived after them and therefore had no right to go in first. My solution was to let in ten at a time from alternating lines. Then today, I had a group of tall athletic young men yelling at me and everyone else I work with that our policiy is unfair and we should have caved to the mob in order to decide how to handle our waitlist (we didn't, but there was still over an hour of bogus 'conversation' my boss had to put up with). Eventually got them to get back in line by moving the line and saying they'd love their place if they didn't move with it, and in the end they did get numbers and even tickets to see the film, 'Be Kind Rewind', a Michel Gondry film with Jack Black and Mos Def.

When quelling a revolution, it helps to put the assholes away first.

Normally it takes about a week for people to get this ornery. Normally, the first weekend of the festival is a breeze. Everyone is happy to be out here, enjoying the mixed atmosphere of film culture and resort town. This year, people are demanding and angry right of the bat.

I shouldn't paint too broadly here. Most people are perfectly reasonable, and many people have expressed they sympathies to me, and some have even apologized for bad behavior. All the same, the bad apples seem to have blossomed much sooner than usual.

The combination of problems means that I am multi-tasking more than usual and working outside quite a bit. My co-worker has it worse. She typically starts the day with only one staff member (she should have four) and works outside for eight hours.

All the same, it all ends well. We are working on the problems and the upper echelons stopped in today to see our policies in action. Also, at the end of the day, there are beers and mates and we all decompress and go see films before getting up to do it again the next day.