Alright, last week was some stupid film festival. I should have written about is sooner obviously but whatever. The main point of this is just for a small rant about how stupid those film fest people were. Seriously, if someone had come to me last Wednesday, the day before the festival started, and told me, “we need you to organize this,” I probably could have done a better job then these people.
So, I’m going to skip most of it for you guys and just talk about the last night of it, last Sunday. This was the night that the film festival was showing the new Michel Moore movie “Capitalism: A Love Story” or something. This was the only movie they played that seemed to draw a crowd. A crowd that hung out extremely loudly and filled our whole lobby for a good 45 minutes. You see, they said that they were starting the movie at 6:30 so people started showing up at 6:15. However, they film fest organizers failed to pay attention to the fact that the movie they were playing before that didn’t end until about 6:50.
Now obviously this is bad, and it makes US look bad. Which is stupid as shit because WE weren’t running any of this. We were literally a place of business that the film fest was renting space in to do their own thing. We had no information about what movies were playing, where they were playing, how long they were, nothing. So when customers came to ask us questions about it we, obviously, told them to talk to the festival people. The kicker being, the fucking festival people started asking us questions about shit. Ugh, hold on I’m getting ahead of myself.
So the second showing of this Capitalism movie was supposed to start at 9:00. Considering how late the first one was its no surprise the second one started late too. But of course, before it was supposed to start people began to show up. First was 2 elderly people saying they were volunteers and they were supposed to be able to watch the movie for free tonight. As usual I told them to go talk to the lady at the festival table. She wasn’t there though, no one seemed to know where she was. Well more and more people start showing up and finally the first showing ends. That organizer lady comes out of there and starts talking to us and asks if all those people, now somewhere between 8 and 12, were here for the festival. Fucking terrible.
Then around 9:15 when most of the people who would be showing up had, and they are waiting to get in, she comes up to our counter, “Do you know when you will be able to start this movie?”
When will WE start it? Its not our fucking job to start your shit. Just like it isn’t our job to know where you fucking movies are. That is why you had to fucking hire that god damn projectionist lady from fucking 50 miles away at last minute, to play your shit. It isn’t our fucking problem.
I did not say this to her of course. Eventually they finally got it started, sometime close to 9:40.
When the movie finally ended there was one last kicker for me. A person came out of the theater, and came up to me to tell me a problem he had. Something about the houselights not seeming to go down and how it bothered him the whole movie. I very politely, as I always do, told the man I was sorry and we might have been able to do something if someone had told us the problem during the movie. He didn’t seem to want to here that though, he wanted to tell me about how we should really make sure it doesn’t happen again. I explained how we at our establishment work very hard to make sure things like that don’t happen but unfortunately we were not responsible for the film festival movies or anything they failed to do. I assured him that we never let that happen when WE played movies. He gave me a look of “Oh I’m sure it wasn’t YOUR fault, of course it was someone else.” It dripped with sarcasm and all I could do was be pissed off as he walked away.
I am not a particularly angry person or anything. However if there is one thing that ticks me the fuck off, its people not understanding shit like that. When you start looking at the work my people and I do, and start telling us we are doing our jobs wrong when it isn’t our job, I will explain it to you. If a theater doesn’t get cleaned, fine that is our mistake, we can and will take responsibility for it. But when you start telling me or my team we are doing things wrong because you don’t know who is supposed to be doing it or how it is supposed to be done, then FUCK YOU.
We were doing shit we weren’t supposed to do just to keep those film fest fuckers afloat. We saved their fucking festival and what happens? They still managed to do so fucking terrible that it makes me and my team look bad simply because it happened at our location. Now, if we had done something bad, if me and mine had made ourselves look bad, then fine. But we didn’t, they made us look bad, and I am still fucking pissed about it.
Saturday, September 26, 2009
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Banking
Ugh what the fuck is up with my bank taking forever to do shit these days. I need my damn money to be in my damn account. NOW DO IT!
Friday, September 11, 2009
Vacation - Day 4
I got out of the hotel room about an hour after waking up on the last day. Partly because I wanted to start the day, and party because I had to get out of the hotel room by noon. The following goal to accomplish was feeding myself.
After a short time of driving around in circles, slightly confused by the 1-way streets, I eventually found my way to the downtown area. Finding somewhere to part was surprisingly easy, probably because the large parking lot wasn’t taken up with a farmer’s market, as the signs indicated had happened the day before.
I walked down the street one way and at what seemed to be the end of the business area I noticed an Indian food restaurant. I had been having a surprising desire for Indian food since the day before so I jumped at the chance. The food was quite tasty, although, the amount of Dal was a bit smaller then I had anticipated. This was of course offset by the Spinach portion and butternut squash mush that came with it. Overall it was a pretty tasty meal.
Unfortunately I had quite a few hours to kill before my friend who lived in Santa Cruz finished his prior arrangements. The other guy I knew I couldn’t seem to get a hold of. So, I walked all the way down the main street the opposite direction and at the other end bought a jamba juice before heading back to my car. Next, I drove out to the coast and followed it to some kind of “Surf Museum.” I didn’t really care to see that however so I instead just parked my car and walked along the cliffs overlooking the ocean. After spending quite some time there I made my way down to some touristy wharf and strolled all the way down that and back.
The sights of all the hordes of people on the beaches got me wanting to take a bit of a swim. I, of course, didn’t own any swimming trunks. I made my way back downtown to do a bit of shopping. Right after I was stepping out of the store with my new blue swimming trunks and some horribly stupid “Santa Cruz” beach towel, my phone began to ring. It was sometime after 3 at this point, and he had some bad news for me. He had forgotten that he promised to see a movie, however I was welcome to join them. I happened to be standing across the street from a large movie theater and asked him if that was the place he was going. He was a bit taken back that I somehow knew and then started saying that he could see me. It’s a bit silly when you are on the phone with someone you can see but don’t know it.
Anyway, having spent most of the day alone and in the blaring hot sun, I went ahead and watched the movie with them. Unfortunately this was Harry Potter, but the second viewing was a bit better then the first one. It was also a little interesting to see the differences in how the theater was operating.
After the movie I simply had to goto the beach. It would have been to much of a waste to buy these items and not use them. So he took me to, I think it was Starbright Beach, or something like that. It was a very nice beach, the funny part about it being the only thing that separated it from the Boardwalk beach was a little outcropping of rocks. This appeared to be enough to have the crowd on the beach be a good 5000 people fewer though. The water was very cold but it felt pretty good.
We didn’t stay to long, probably a good thing since I didn’t have any sunscreen or anything. But we were hungry. He showed me a cool little place that you could get basically any Asian food you desired. This was kind of weird, most restaurants only allow you to pick from one ethic group’s cuisine. I ended up with a pretty standard chinese chicken and rice bowl, and my friend got some kind of peanut sauce thai noodles.
It was after dinner that I decided it would be wise to start the journey home. My friend suggested taking highway-17 out of Santa Cruz because there was a fire starting up somewhere near highway-1's exit. I filled up my tank one last time, and took his advice. It was a pretty pleasant drive home, only about 2 hours. When I got back into town I dropped by a friend’s house. It was his birthday and I just had to stop by. From there on out it was just a pretty standard night.
After a short time of driving around in circles, slightly confused by the 1-way streets, I eventually found my way to the downtown area. Finding somewhere to part was surprisingly easy, probably because the large parking lot wasn’t taken up with a farmer’s market, as the signs indicated had happened the day before.
I walked down the street one way and at what seemed to be the end of the business area I noticed an Indian food restaurant. I had been having a surprising desire for Indian food since the day before so I jumped at the chance. The food was quite tasty, although, the amount of Dal was a bit smaller then I had anticipated. This was of course offset by the Spinach portion and butternut squash mush that came with it. Overall it was a pretty tasty meal.
Unfortunately I had quite a few hours to kill before my friend who lived in Santa Cruz finished his prior arrangements. The other guy I knew I couldn’t seem to get a hold of. So, I walked all the way down the main street the opposite direction and at the other end bought a jamba juice before heading back to my car. Next, I drove out to the coast and followed it to some kind of “Surf Museum.” I didn’t really care to see that however so I instead just parked my car and walked along the cliffs overlooking the ocean. After spending quite some time there I made my way down to some touristy wharf and strolled all the way down that and back.
The sights of all the hordes of people on the beaches got me wanting to take a bit of a swim. I, of course, didn’t own any swimming trunks. I made my way back downtown to do a bit of shopping. Right after I was stepping out of the store with my new blue swimming trunks and some horribly stupid “Santa Cruz” beach towel, my phone began to ring. It was sometime after 3 at this point, and he had some bad news for me. He had forgotten that he promised to see a movie, however I was welcome to join them. I happened to be standing across the street from a large movie theater and asked him if that was the place he was going. He was a bit taken back that I somehow knew and then started saying that he could see me. It’s a bit silly when you are on the phone with someone you can see but don’t know it.
Anyway, having spent most of the day alone and in the blaring hot sun, I went ahead and watched the movie with them. Unfortunately this was Harry Potter, but the second viewing was a bit better then the first one. It was also a little interesting to see the differences in how the theater was operating.
After the movie I simply had to goto the beach. It would have been to much of a waste to buy these items and not use them. So he took me to, I think it was Starbright Beach, or something like that. It was a very nice beach, the funny part about it being the only thing that separated it from the Boardwalk beach was a little outcropping of rocks. This appeared to be enough to have the crowd on the beach be a good 5000 people fewer though. The water was very cold but it felt pretty good.
We didn’t stay to long, probably a good thing since I didn’t have any sunscreen or anything. But we were hungry. He showed me a cool little place that you could get basically any Asian food you desired. This was kind of weird, most restaurants only allow you to pick from one ethic group’s cuisine. I ended up with a pretty standard chinese chicken and rice bowl, and my friend got some kind of peanut sauce thai noodles.
It was after dinner that I decided it would be wise to start the journey home. My friend suggested taking highway-17 out of Santa Cruz because there was a fire starting up somewhere near highway-1's exit. I filled up my tank one last time, and took his advice. It was a pretty pleasant drive home, only about 2 hours. When I got back into town I dropped by a friend’s house. It was his birthday and I just had to stop by. From there on out it was just a pretty standard night.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
Vacation - Day 3
Ok, so I officially missed a blog update. I WILL do 2 this week because of that.
On the second morning I was in Long Beach I got much better sleep. Unfortunately there was some kind of thing going on in the apartment complex which meant that we could not use any water at all from like 10 in the morning till 6 in the evening. I of course, got up in the middle of that time period. Lucky for me and my friend, his girlfriend’s apartment isn’t where he is officially living.
So, we gathered up a few things and headed on over to the apartment he pays for. This place seemed more like the apartment complexes I’m used to. Perhaps one would call them college complexes or something. Judging from the fact that there were numerous girls who appeared to be around our ages sun bathing around the public pool. None of his roommates were there. Once we finished taking our showers we walked down to the shopping center a block or two away.
A large ‘VONS’ store was where I decided to eat. This was the market chain that seemed to be all over southern California. It is Safeway, no question, I even saw a shipping rack that said Safeway on it. This large place was even set up in the exact same way as my local safeway. This was the first time I had ever bought a sandwich from a Safeway, and it actually wasn’t that bad. After grabbing our grub we walked back to the apartment to eat.
We watched the first episode of this “Burn Notice” show, which wasn’t bad, and his roommates returned home with much surprise to see my friend there. It seems he really wasn’t exaggerating when he told me how rarely he goes there. Now, I had been debating heading out to Santa Cruz this day instead of staying in Long Beach one more day because I simply did not want to do that I-5 drive again. So that is what I ended up doing.
We went back to where all my stuff I would need was. I gathered it all up, gave my friend a hearty goodbye, and got a confirmation that if I got lost I could call him up for some directions. Then I set out for a scenic drive.
I started out by getting onto highway-1 north following the coast. Now, my timing for when I left was quite terrible, and I knew it. I was starting out in rush hour. But it was ok, cruising around the coast was just so nice compared to anything else I could have done. I actually like driving, I just don’t like driving roads like I-5; straight and flat, that literally it.
After driving up through Malibu and all those other smaller towns along the coast, the final one being Oxnard, highway-1 merged with 101. Eventually 101 left the coast, which was a little sad because it was a really nice drive with cliffs on one side and ocean off the other. The drive wasn’t very climactic or anything though. I stopped twice before reaching my goal, Salinas, once at a gas station for a piss and a drink, and once for food.
The food was a little comical, as you know I had a sandwich for breakfast. Well that breakfast sandwich was roast beef on a french bread roll with lettuce, onions, cheddar cheese, and a little honey mustard sauce. My dinner was an In-and-Out burger, ground beef on a bun with lettuce, onions, and cheddar. Ah the excitement of food when traveling.
Anyway, so I reached Salinas and was going to stay at a motel. However, I started seeing a bunch of signs for Santa Cruz in Salinas, and I wasn’t really tired. So, I went for it, took the 183 back over to highway-1 right into Santa Cruz. I got a motel room at about 12:30 in the morning. I watched some terrible TV before heading to bed, but that was it for day 3.
On the second morning I was in Long Beach I got much better sleep. Unfortunately there was some kind of thing going on in the apartment complex which meant that we could not use any water at all from like 10 in the morning till 6 in the evening. I of course, got up in the middle of that time period. Lucky for me and my friend, his girlfriend’s apartment isn’t where he is officially living.
So, we gathered up a few things and headed on over to the apartment he pays for. This place seemed more like the apartment complexes I’m used to. Perhaps one would call them college complexes or something. Judging from the fact that there were numerous girls who appeared to be around our ages sun bathing around the public pool. None of his roommates were there. Once we finished taking our showers we walked down to the shopping center a block or two away.
A large ‘VONS’ store was where I decided to eat. This was the market chain that seemed to be all over southern California. It is Safeway, no question, I even saw a shipping rack that said Safeway on it. This large place was even set up in the exact same way as my local safeway. This was the first time I had ever bought a sandwich from a Safeway, and it actually wasn’t that bad. After grabbing our grub we walked back to the apartment to eat.
We watched the first episode of this “Burn Notice” show, which wasn’t bad, and his roommates returned home with much surprise to see my friend there. It seems he really wasn’t exaggerating when he told me how rarely he goes there. Now, I had been debating heading out to Santa Cruz this day instead of staying in Long Beach one more day because I simply did not want to do that I-5 drive again. So that is what I ended up doing.
We went back to where all my stuff I would need was. I gathered it all up, gave my friend a hearty goodbye, and got a confirmation that if I got lost I could call him up for some directions. Then I set out for a scenic drive.
I started out by getting onto highway-1 north following the coast. Now, my timing for when I left was quite terrible, and I knew it. I was starting out in rush hour. But it was ok, cruising around the coast was just so nice compared to anything else I could have done. I actually like driving, I just don’t like driving roads like I-5; straight and flat, that literally it.
After driving up through Malibu and all those other smaller towns along the coast, the final one being Oxnard, highway-1 merged with 101. Eventually 101 left the coast, which was a little sad because it was a really nice drive with cliffs on one side and ocean off the other. The drive wasn’t very climactic or anything though. I stopped twice before reaching my goal, Salinas, once at a gas station for a piss and a drink, and once for food.
The food was a little comical, as you know I had a sandwich for breakfast. Well that breakfast sandwich was roast beef on a french bread roll with lettuce, onions, cheddar cheese, and a little honey mustard sauce. My dinner was an In-and-Out burger, ground beef on a bun with lettuce, onions, and cheddar. Ah the excitement of food when traveling.
Anyway, so I reached Salinas and was going to stay at a motel. However, I started seeing a bunch of signs for Santa Cruz in Salinas, and I wasn’t really tired. So, I went for it, took the 183 back over to highway-1 right into Santa Cruz. I got a motel room at about 12:30 in the morning. I watched some terrible TV before heading to bed, but that was it for day 3.
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