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I've said it before and I'll say it again
4 Days Ago

Forgive me for shouting, but I ING HATE HOLIDAYS!!!

We're about to hit one of the busiest weekends of the whole year. Film industry websites are predicting a record breaker. After last weekend's stupidity with the new Twilight film, which is slowing a little but still pulling them in and selling out the evening shows, and the slow build of the Sandra Bullock film Blind Side (big in Austin because she's a local lass) which is also selling out the evening shows and almost selling out the afternoon matinees, we have three new films this weekend - The Road, The Fantastic Mr Fox and Ninja Assassins, all of which are showing healthy presales. So what happens?

Thursday is usually the day I phone in all the beer and wine orders for delivery on Friday, but since tomorrow's a holiday I had to do that today. We have very limited storage space so I've got to call on all my powers of prediction to figure out how much beer and wine we're going to sell today and tomorrow so that we a) have enough to get us through the busy weekend but b) don't have so much that there's nowhere to put it all.

Some of our suppliers have simply shut down for four days. WTF You're in the restaurant/bar supply business! Don't bugger off when your customers need you the most! If you want to do that, get out of the damn business and do something else. I had to take delivery of several kegs/cases of beer and a couple of cases of wine today that we don't need until Friday. The walk-in is a mess right now because of all the extra kegs.

And just to put the lid on it Cap Metro are running a Sunday service on Thursday (understandable, no problem with that), but a Saturday service on Friday. Now, I know that a lot of offices are going to be shut on Friday but a for a lot of businesses it's just another working day and plenty of people are still going to be working, notably people in shops and restaurants, who are often not well enough paid to afford a car and who are going to be hellabusy. So I've got to deal with bus intervals of an hour for four straight days

And to put a lid on *that*, the weather on Sunday is not looking good, and when it rains we get ed.

Ah well, it could be worse. I could be having to get up at 3am on Friday so that people can go shopping in the middle of the night, shout at me, abuse me, swear at me and generally make my working day a misery. Nobody needs to be shopping at that time of the day. Srsly.

(15 replies, Latest reply: 11 Hours Ago)

What a curious weekend
Last Week

Twilight.

What do you reckon the target audience is going to be? It's going to be mostly female, of course. Teenage girls? Sure - it's PG 13. Young women? Yeah, them too.

Bearing in mind the legal drinking age in Texas is 21, you wouldn't think there'd be much call for me to order booze this weekend. Oh, I figured there'd be a little more wine than usual going down the throats of those old enough to order it.

Boy was I wrong! Sort of. Yeah, we sold record amounts of sangria (which, for our European readers bears only passing resemblance to the sangria you might have had in Spain or in a Spanish restaurant) and mimosa after mimosa after mimosa to the twenty-something girlies. So much so that we almost ran out of the cheap champagne we use in the mimosas and to give the sangria some fizz, and I had to improvise by stretching it out with a boxed chardonnay wine that the kitchen cook with, and I've had to blag our supplier into sending more cases of champagne on Monday, as well as some of the red wine we actually make the sangria mix with, even though our usual delivery day for them is Tuesday.

Lots of ice cream and milk shakes you'd think. Not really Guess they must all be dieting... or anorexic. Which doesn't seem likely because why would you come to a cinema where you can eat and drink if you're anorexic? And hell, this is Texas - not exactly known for watching its weight. Although we did get through a fantastic amount of Diet Coke syrup.

But here's the biggest of all - they've almost drunk us out of all our cheap domestic beer bottles! The Miller Light, the Bud Light, the Lone Star. I don't get it. I mean, stupendously large amounts. The kind of amounts I'd normally associate with a frat boy comedy like Superbad or Knocked Up or 40 Year Old Virgin.

It seems like a lot of the sales were from the lobby bar, which serves only bottled beer and glasses of wine, so there's a good chance that a lot of them were already shitfaced before they even got to their seat, which might be why we sold less draft beer than I figured we would this weekend.

The film's already on the wane, judging by the pattern of ticket sales for the weekend. Thursday midnight shows (six screens) all sold out a week in advance, Friday shows (four shows a day on two screens) all sold out by 10am, Saturday shows all sold out by 8am, Sunday shows... none sold out until about 1pm, first show of the day (12.30pm) didn't sell out at all, and Sunday's usually busier than Saturday for us.

And the next one comes out in June next year Just a week or two after the next Sex and the City film And the next Shrek film, and Iron Man 2 and Toy Story 3 and The Karate Kid and The A Team.

I'm just going to sit in a corner and cry for a little while, if that's alright with you.

(20 replies, Latest reply: 6 Days Ago)

As if I needed any encouragement!
Last Week

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8367141.stm

(20 replies, Latest reply: Last Week)

What's got 800 legs and no pubic hair?
Last Week

Our cinema all weekend long

(5 replies, Latest reply: Last Week)

I don't get it
2 Weeks Ago

Quoting, that is. Like this, for instance:
F77636?thread=7070303&show=20&skip=20#p88348863

What's the point? Most of us here are intelligent enough to write a reply to a previous post, whether it be immediately adjacent or distant in the backlogue, in such a way that it answers a comment without cutting and pasting said comment, and when the quoted text is in the post directly above it just looks plain silly. It's not even necessary in fast-moving conversations. I gotta be honest with you, I find it intellectually lazy. It takes next to no time (but a little bit of thought) to compose a reply that addresses the comment in question, no more time than it does to cut and paste and put the comment in quotes, or chevrons, or any of the myriad other methods people use to indicate a previously stated comment.

(11 replies, Latest reply: 5 Days Ago)