The Break Room (another TAT adventure)

Keeping in tune with my last Totally Awkward Tuesday post I am going to talk to you about another awkward moment from my days at the movie theater. Today is a two-for you lucky ducks you! I've decided that since I have TWO fantastical moments pertaining to the same room (read on, I'll get to explaining soon), I will go ahead and share them both with you today. This is actually more for me. I'd like to spare myself the agony of rehashing old memories that quite frankly, aren't looked upon fondly (I say that, but really, they do make me chuckle...now).

As you know, well you WOULD know if you read my blog regularly. ahem.

As I was saying, as you know I worked at one of Juneau's two movie theaters. From about the age of 15 until I was 18 (with a brief stint at 19 when I came home from college, but I digress. I do that often in case you haven't noticed.).

I started out working at the theater in the concession stand. Later I was promoted to usher duties and then I got to work the coveted box office. These were not monetary promotions, the only raise I got was in my pride. We hated working in concession, for obvious reasons (the smell of popcorn was permanently scorched into my nostrils, for one).

My first supervisor (I won't name names. You never know who'll come across this blog!) was rather creepy, OK maybe creepy isn't very nice. Well, yeah, creepy. There's no mincing words here. I'll explain: He was a dork, to put it bluntly. He was tall and lanky, had big square framed glasses and held his too tight black jeans up with big belt buckles while tucking in whatever polo shirt he was wearing for the day. On top of that his jeans were tapered...ew. He was older, maybe in his late 20s or early 30s. Think: D&D, Magic and trench coats. This supervisor tried desperately to fit in with his employees which only served to drive him further away from us.

To make a weird situation worse, he appeared to have a crush on each of the girls at one point in time. So occasionally we'd catch him staring. Once while I was washing the nacho cheese cooker in the back he rubbed up a little to close for my personal comfort as he passed behind me to get by. *shudder*

Eventually he was transferred out to the larger theater in the valley (we all had a huge sigh of relief!) and my buddy Sky became the new supe.

*Side note* I hear he married one of his employees from the valley theater. She is a girl I went to high school with. No joke!

None of us actually came into work already dressed for work. The uniform was black pants, button up white shirt and a maroon vest (later they added bow ties, THANK GOODNESS that was after I was outta there!). Most of my cohorts were like me, we kept our uniforms in our lockers upstairs in the break room and brought them home every couple days for a washing. We would lock the door and change there.

The break room was dingy and at the top of the stairs right next to the entrance of the 2nd story theater. The door to the break room had those hinges that automatically swing shut behind you, so if we weren't careful the door would slam loudly behind us (we were constantly being told never to forget this while a movie was showing in the upstairs theater, apparently movie goers found the loud BANG disturbing). The room consisted of decades old recliners, a wall of small lockers and an old desk. The walls were lined with old movie posters and the carpet hadn't been changed since the 1960s (my guess, but really it could have been longer). At one end of the room was the "cup room." A door that usually stayed locked until we needed to get more cups for the concession stand.

It was in this room that my two stories take place.

Awkward Story Number One:
I bounded up the stairs in my usual happy-go-lucky way. It was a great day to be alive, I was 15 and it was summer time. The fact that I had a crush on one of my co-workers made me LOVE coming to work, well at least on the days we worked together. Today was one of those days and I was on top of the world. I was humming some song to myself as I let myself into the break room. As usual I locked the door behind me and walked to my locker. I noticed the cup room door was open but didn't think anything of it because we'd been doing monthly inventory the night before.
I pulled out the usual pieces of clothing needed for a night on the job and tore off the summer frock I had on. I proceeded to sing to myself (it was roughly 1995, I'm guessing it was either a Salt N Peppa tune or maybe Boyz II Men, I really dunno, this is purely speculation at this point). I got dressed and headed back downstairs to flirt with my crush before the shift started.
I had just arrived at the bottom of the stairs when I realized I needed to talk to my supervisor about a shift swap but no one knew where he was. Oh well, I'll talk to him later I thought to myself. About 30 seconds later we hear the break room door slam shut and said supe starts walking down the stairs carrying a stack of....cups.
Wait wuh?
That's when it hit me. Crap! I'd just gotten dressed while creepy guy here was in the next room with the door wide open! He never admitted that he saw me. But I swear later on that night I heard him humming the same tune I'd been singing to myself earlier.

OK, so that was more "freaky deeky" than awkward. But my face was burning as my coworkers figured it out for themselves what had happened.


Awkward Story Number Two:
I had just opened the door to the break room to get dressed for my shift. When, what to my wondering eyes should appear, a moon of a guy which was really his rear!
"Holy crap!! Get outta here!" Is along the lines of what I heard.
It took only seconds to realize I'd walked in on my coworker (Dumb, from my previous TAT post. Look it up.) getting dressed. He had his pants down around his ankles and as he screamed (like a girl I might add) he yanked them back up.
I quickly made haste and retreated to the safety of the hallway. Shutting the door tightly behind me as I quickly burst into a fit of laughter.
Of course it was slightly embarrassing to walk in on him that way, but I was no where near as embarrASSed (couldn't resist) as he was at that moment. Being the teenager I was, I quickly ran down to share with my coworkers the f*n funny moment I'd just witnessed.
The one thing none of us could figure out was why did he have his underwear down too? Did he change those with each shift, or was there another reason? We decided we didn't need to know.

I've just decided that the latter of these two stories makes up for Dumb calling me Wrecking Ball. He got his in the end. hehe

I totally want a gnome like this!

My pal over at Secret Life of Tova Darling talked about one of her awkward school girl crushes this time, it's a hoot so you should check her out! If you would like to partake in this weeks installment of Totally Awkward Tuesday, leave me a comment with a link back to your post. I'll put it at the bottom of this one so everyone can see!

Until next time. Peace out yo!