Re: NOTHING but VENTS - Vent all you want without replies
Y'know...I wasn't going to do this tonight...but where it's past 2:30 AM and I'm STILL at the movie theater on a night I don't normally go in at all...
So, backstory, just to get you up to speed. I work at a discount theater, I'm the guy who downloads all the hard drives into our servers, and takes the schedule they prepare and programs it into the system so everything runs automatically and the managers, hopefully, never need to come upstairs between opening and closing. For the past...oh, two months and change, we had a weird software glitch pop up, and we couldn't download any new trailers, at all...every time we tried, we'd get an error message that popped up. It didn't affect any of our movie drives, just the ones with the trailers. And, being a discount theater, it was no big deal...I mean, we're just starting to show stuff that came out in early October, so not getting the latest movie trailers for a few weeks wasn't a problem for anyone besides me, and for me, it was just an inconvenience. But I got ahold of the dealer for our projection gear and let them know it was a problem...
And nothing happened. A couple of weeks went by, and I contacted them again. "Oh, crap...I forgot you had told us about that. I should be able to get up there sometime this week and take care of it, I'm pretty sure it's a hardware problem." Well...nobody showed up, still a problem the next week. And the week after that.
Got a text this morning that they had been in, the problem should be solved...so I said I'd come in to check on it. And it turns out, the problem is only KIND OF solved. Yes, I can now download stuff off the movie trailer drives...but if I try to do more than one trailer at a time, the server freaks out a little bit and starts failing downloads on me (actually rebooted on me earlier this evening. Luckily, it can do that while movies are running without screwing up the playback...) So, I'm sitting here, downloading EACH AND EVERY trailer that we've missed for the past two months, one at a time. And I'd be done, but I've also been trying to do a little props shopping for a show I'm in...so I get sucked down the rabbit hole of eBay or Amazon for a few minutes, and then realize, "Oh, yeah! Next trailer, come on, stick with the program here!" I'm going on six hours, which included the trial and error time of finding out that I couldn't just go through and select all the trailers, like normal (because I did it twice and only got a handful of trailers each time...so then I tried just doing five at a time, and only got the first one...) Plus, I have rehearsal in the morning...
I kinda want to slap the service tech. I mean, I even left the drive available so he could test it out once he fixed it. He put it in the machine, made sure it could read the drive, apparently (which it was doing before...) But he didn't try downloading anything from the drive, or else he would have discovered that there's still a problem.
I LOVE it when my job is complicated by someone else doing shoddy work on their job. I mean, it's job security...I've been told repeatedly that I could just about burn down the theater and I'd still have a job, simply because nobody else wants to do what I'm doing, but I actually kind of enjoy it, most of the time. Nights like tonight? Not so much...I'm running on sheer bull-headedness right now...I'm gonna get these stupid trailers into the system if it keeps me awake all night...