Kenny's Head • oswald-ears: kennyvee replied to your post: Hiya!...

oswald-ears:

kennyvee replied to your post: Hiya! Is there any chance we can hear this mickey mouse club song story?
Seriously the best hiring story! This beats the movie theater in Illinois that hired me after an interview that just consisted of talking about how cool Disneyland is.

what omg I want to hear this story now.

Also I want to talk about how cool Disneyland is with random people at a movie theater.

OK, though it’s not as exciting as your story. I rambled (I know, shocking), so I’ll put it under a Read More.

When I moved to Illinois, I applied at quite a few places. Within the course of a few days, I had offers from three different places. There was PetSmart, who had me come in and take a personality test. One of the questions was “have you ever stolen from an employer?” Duh. No. Even if I had, I’d have been smart enough to lie about it.

Then the next question was “have you ever thought about stealing from an employer?” Sure, of course I have. I worked at Disneyland, in Outdoor Vending. We were surrounded with cash. So of course, temptation would come up once in a while. But if you valued your job (which I did), that’s as far as it went. But on some cold, rainy days when guests were few and far between, the mind would wander, and sometimes those thoughts would be part of it. So I answered truthfully: “Yes, I’ve thought about it, though I’ve never done it.”

Apparently, this honesty in my answer instantly qualified me for a management position. So I was called back in and offered a job as an assistant manager, despite the fact that I knew nothing about pet supplies and, though I had a dog, didn’t know much about taking care of them other than “when the parents are gone, put food and water in the right bowls.”

Anyway, two days later, Pizza Hut called with a job offer. Their only request was that I shave off my newly-grown post-Disney goatee, which I was willing to do (considering that I’d just spent years not allowed to have one). So I took some paperwork home from them. As I was filling it out, the movie theater where I’d applied called and offered me an interview.

I went in and met a lady who said that she was one of four assistant managers, but the main boss was on vacation. So she said that she would interview me, and if it went well, she’d tell the head manager to interview me when he got back.

So I went in for my interview and went up to the projection booth with her to the main manager’s office. I was blown away when I saw the projectors. I was expecting this:

and instead saw these behemoths:

I got to play with those a year or so later during a union lockout of our projectionists, but that’s another story.

So the assistant manager and I went into the office and sat down, and she started talking about how much she loved Disneyland, and had gone there about a year before. She asked me some questions about the park (not about what I did there, but basic “how does this work?” sort of questions), so I told her about where the floats are parked behind Main Street between parades, how the ballroom ghosts in the Haunted Mansion worked, etc. About 20 minutes into our conversation, she got called on her walkie-talkie and we went back down to the lobby so she could get back to work.

She told me that she’d call the boss and ask if she could just hire me without waiting for him, because she was convinced she wouldn’t find anyone better.

The next afternoon, she called and asked when I could start. And, since I’d worked with so much cash at Disneyland, she had gotten permission to start me off in the box office, where normally new people aren’t left alone with the cash in there (at the concession stand, there was always someone else there to see it if you did anything untowards). I started work, in the box office, a few days before I was supposed to have had my second interview.

So I called PetSmart and Pizza Hut and thanked them for their consideration, but told them that I’d accepted another offer. Working in the entertainment industry was WAY more my speed, even if I was accepting a lower position than I would have had at PetSmart.

I don’t regret it. Even though I hired into Cineplex Odeon, and then went through the stress of wondering if we’d be shut down when we were bought out by Loews Cineplex Entertainment (we weren’t), then we saw all of our business vanish when an AMC 30-screen megaplex opened a few miles away in one direction and then, a couple months later, a General Cinemas 18-screen premium theater opened even closer to us in the other direction. The market became over-saturated. Even though we were the least expensive at out 10-screen theater ($3 less on average, showing the same movies), people wanted the latest and greatest. We had the digital sound, but we didn’t have stadium seating.

The theater doesn’t exist anymore (last I heard, it’s now a Bed, Bath, & Beyond). Loews Cineplex itself ended up merging with AMC. I bounced around to a couple different theaters as I moved up the chain of command, but when I have dreams about the movie theater days, they’re always set at that first theater where I got hired for being a Disney nerd.