Interview with a Drunken Movie Theater Employee is a six-part series that will progress over the next few weeks. If you missed part one, you can read it here. For some context, the anonymous employee was in the process of dying their hair during the interview, hence the hairnet. I hope you will enjoy the story as it unfolds.
Do people ever ask you weird questions about the movies?
Anon: Let me crawl around and think about it.
Me: Why do you need to crawl around to think about this?
Anon: Oh! Yesterday—two days—five days ago. This guy, this man—no, wait, what’s today? Today’s Monday. It was yesterday. I was correct the first time. I thought it was Friday for a long time today. It’s Monday. Guy comes up to me, right? You can just like tell right off the bat when someone’s just like really low on the intelligence spectrum. He had two twin boys with him, and they were like—they had braces and they were asking for soft things. They were like, ‘Is the pretzels soft?’ And I was like, ‘Always.’ This is going to go back to the movie.
Me: Hold on, I’m sorry, but both of them had braces? So like an adult man and a boy had braces?
Anon: No, there was two twin boys. Are you going to put that in?
Me: I don’t know. That’s what I was imagining in my head, and I needed to clarify.
Anon: Back to the story. Anyway, they kept asking me things. Like, food items that someone could think about and be like, hmm, is this soft, and they could like think on their own, they had to ask me. They were like, ‘Do you have Dibs?’ And I was like, ‘Yes, we have two kinds of Dibs.’ And they were like, ‘Which ones’ softer?’ And I’m like, they’re literally the same softness. He was like, ‘Oh, you have soft pretzels?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ And then he said, ‘Are the soft pretzels soft?’ And I was like, yeah!
Anyway, during the same transaction, this man, I get him an ice cream sandwich. Before he even pays, he proceeds to eat the whole thing and gives me the wrapper. Then he goes, ‘Oh, did you have that "Benghazi" movie?’ And we’re like—we, I say that like there was multiple people, it was just me talking—I said, ‘Yes, we had it, but we got rid of it.’ He was like, ‘I think I know why you got rid of it.’ I was like, ‘Oh, do you, sir?’ He was like, ‘I think it’s because of the presidency … Do you think it’s because of the presidency that they got rid of that movie? You think it was like a conspiracy?’ I was like, ‘Your guess is as good as mine, sir. But, to be honest, we just got a lot of movies in last week, and that’s probably why.’ Moral of the story is: It doesn’t matter what you tell people because they will always believe the first thing they know. I learned that in social psychology. The first thing that someone learns about a certain subject—no matter what information that comes in that tells them differently, they will never be able to stray from that original idea.