Rugrats Go Wild

I don't mean to brag, but once upon a time I worked my way up from an usher all the way up to a projectionist for a chain of semi-popular theaters. With my elite status and quasi-promotion came the task of using a twenty foot pool skimmer to change the movie marquee on the outside of our building. The purpose of having a javelin with a bathroom mat suction pad stuck to the bottom of it was that it assisted in placing over-sized novelty letters along the front banner of the theater so that people could drive by and know what's playing. First off, how antiquated is that? Who drives by their local AMC to see what's playing? Don't we all have these things called computers and smartphones in which we can see the times and showings that are convenient for us with a simple click of a button? I mean, who really has the scheduling flexibility to just meander on into a theater after seeing that Spring Breakers is playing? I mean, I know seeing a half-naked coked out Selena Gomez is enticing, but don't people have these things called jobs and families that they have to attend to? Or is three hours and $15 really that easy to squeeze into the average persons day?
 
Anyway, I always tried to get the movies spelled out as quickly as possible, because who wants to spend four hours lining up 132 characters on a banner that's suspended twenty three feet in the air? I never knew what movies our theater was going to get, so the managers I worked with would always provide me with a diagram that detailed what was playing, the layout of each title, and the exact way each film was spelled. As you can imagine, theater managers aren't exactly light years ahead of their subordinates. They're kind of like a combination of Anna Faris from Scary Movie and Seann William Scott from American Pie. I mean, obviously the managers weren't that smart, but if you stuck both Anna and Seann in a juicer, added gasoline and lit the remnants on fire you'd be close. That's why it makes sense that one time the living embodiment of Stifler thought it would be cute to give me the movie layout with the movie Rugrats Go Wild  spelled as "The Rugrats Gone Wild." Not that big of a difference, right? Sure, one is the actual title of the movie and the other is a porn series that runs eight hours worth of late night ads on Comedy Central. But really, who am I to second guess my bosses? It's not like I'm an avid connoisseur of all that is Rugrats either. I'll admit that watching one year-olds banter about needing to be changed gets me rock hard, but I just never made a concerted effort to DVR that particular show. And by DVR'ing I mean recording the episodes onto a VHS tape that's been taped over so many times that everything just starts to bleed together into a single stew of broken dreams and magnetism.
 
I knew Rugrats was a show meant for kids with learning disabilities, but that's as far as my knowledge went. So I went to work, applied the letters to the banner, and proceeded on with my day as if nothing was amiss. In retrospect thinking that Nickelodeon was being clever and poking fun at the amateur porn industry was probably a foolish oversight on my behalf. I hardly ever over think things, though. I tend to focus on accomplishing the goals that were set out for me by my superiors. I generally try not to second guess the work that my higher-ups lay out for me.

Smash cut to four hours later when our corporate supervisor decided to stop by for his once a month visit. Naturally, this embodiment of evil asked the same managers that set me up to fail to point out the perpetrator of this classless crime against children's programming. The managers casually threw me under the bus, accepted zero responsibility, and watched through the ticket taking window as this suit and tie wearing prick led me outside and laid into me for being "fucking stupid." This guy did more than just humiliate me, though. He continued to find new ways to call me incompetent for nearly ten minutes and only let me back inside when I was nearly in tears. 

When he finally left, I came back in the theater and was met with a universal round of apologies followed by several people saying, "I would've quit if anyone ever said that to me." Thinking back, I should have told this hack to go drown himself in our pretzel cheese. I just didn't know any better. I was 16 and had never had another on-the-books job. I just thought that this was how all bosses were. Now that I'm older and more mature I would've properly told this stuffy old heart attack waiting to happen to go fuck himself. What did a movie misspelling really cost the company? Nothing. It probably got a few chuckles and maybe one complaint by an overly evangelical stay-at-home mom. Quite the crisis I'm sure. It definitely didn't warrant being ostracized publicly. The good news is this guy is probably dead or divorced by now. I'm guessing both. Maybe not in that order, though. I honestly understand getting upset about a fuck up, but does demeaning me fix the problem? Talk to me first, then we'll hammer out what happened and I'll fix the issue. What else is there to it? It would have been one thing if I took a can of Krylon and painted the name of the movie on the sidewalk in front of the ticket taking booth, but I didn't. I just misplaced a couple of movable tiles. Instead of understanding this, Kim Jong Un felt compelled to try and cause another person to paint their hair orange, claim they're the joker and shoot up another Coloradan, or in this case, Californian theater. Seriously, bosses, you can talk to us like we're adults and not like we're your incontinent beagle that just shit on your shag carpet. Trust me when I say you'll reap the rewards of your mental charity for years to come in the form of loyalty, dependability and hard work. Otherwise, depending on the employee, you might just discover where your pissed off peon wants you to insert the double disc Blu-Ray of the Rugrats movie. Better yet, you might find out exactly where scrawled out across 27 feet of real estate on the marquee in front of the theater.