W = Fd(cos θ)
Okay, so... work was pretty awesome yesterday. I won't give a synopsis of the experience, but here are some things of note:
1. Rush hour early Friday evenings is death. (I got there over ten minutes late, when I should have gotten there about twenty minutes early. On the upside, I got to listen to a lot of Queen...)
2. I unwittingly picked an excellent event to be my first shift. The actual show (some quartet) was small (we counted 122 tickets, plus latecomers), but I had a lot to do behind the scenes. The house manager (...I keep wanting to call it "housemaster") kept apologizing and saying that there's not usually that much manual labor to do. (I moved tables before the show, after intermission, and after the show.)
2a. I also managed to end up working with nobody I had never met before, with the exception of the house manager. The other three ushers were my inside source, another prep kid, and the guy I encountered when signing up (which I detailed in my Oct. 12th entry). The fifth usher, if he had shown up, would have been yet another prep kid. How this many prep kids snuck by the official list (that, remember, I said has only two highschoolers on it including me) I really don't know.
2b. The combination of light traffic and people I knew made the shift rather social. Because a lot of the time we were standing at the entrance to the theater with no theatergoers coming through, we talked about... rather a lot. I did get told stories about busy days when the ushers are too busy trying to get people into the theater to do more than constant ticket-ripping or program-handing-out or stuff. This is good; flexible professional demeanor is, I think, a good quality. Or something.
3. It might be prudent to bring something to do in the future for when I'm in the back room during the show. Unless I'd want to actually watch it, I'd spend the time back there doing... whatever presents itself. Again, this time mostly I spent it talking to people, but in the future I won't necessarily know anyone else. Until I do.
4. There is a technique to ticket ripping. Well, I assume there's more than one, but I was shown one the guy called "flick and rip." (Apparently once you get good enough at it you can rip as you flick, which would cut time down by about half...) I have much room for improvement, of course, but I caught on quickly enough to keep audience members from waiting impatiently as I struggled to rip the stubs off their tickets...
4a. Please nobody hand a theater usher a stack of tickets that are all facing different directions. The stubs have to be aligned to be ripped all at once, and it's time-consuming (and a little annoying) to have to fix them before ripping. On the other hand, if you have multiple tickets, it does go faster if you hand them over in a stack. Just don't try to be sneaky and have more people than tickets in the stack.
All in all... I am very happy I managed to get this job. I think I shall enjoy it quite a lot.
Also: I was introduced to Flight of the Conchord, a New Zealand...ish... er? New Zealander? New Zealish? Uh... yeah. A duo from New Zealand. Comedy duo with guitar and song. I'm actually rather impressed; they're funny, yeah, but mostly I love how well they work together. They barely even look at each other, and yet are exactly together when the song demands it. And! I found I recognized one of their songs. I recognized it from Calumet. One of the years, during the Staff Show, two of the counselors did their song Jenny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlYkIJVguCU. So I knew how it went already, but it was still funny. I was actually introduced with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbbxA8a_M_s. I'm currently scouring youtube for more.
In other news, today I read chapter 13 of my AP Constitutional Government textbook. It was 50 pages long. Fifty. That should not be allowed. Well--okay, I guess it can be allowed. But not when I'm expecting chapters to average 30 pages long... perhaps I should stop assuming that this book is just like my AP Amer. hist. textbook except thinner. Ah well.
1. Rush hour early Friday evenings is death. (I got there over ten minutes late, when I should have gotten there about twenty minutes early. On the upside, I got to listen to a lot of Queen...)
2. I unwittingly picked an excellent event to be my first shift. The actual show (some quartet) was small (we counted 122 tickets, plus latecomers), but I had a lot to do behind the scenes. The house manager (...I keep wanting to call it "housemaster") kept apologizing and saying that there's not usually that much manual labor to do. (I moved tables before the show, after intermission, and after the show.)
2a. I also managed to end up working with nobody I had never met before, with the exception of the house manager. The other three ushers were my inside source, another prep kid, and the guy I encountered when signing up (which I detailed in my Oct. 12th entry). The fifth usher, if he had shown up, would have been yet another prep kid. How this many prep kids snuck by the official list (that, remember, I said has only two highschoolers on it including me) I really don't know.
2b. The combination of light traffic and people I knew made the shift rather social. Because a lot of the time we were standing at the entrance to the theater with no theatergoers coming through, we talked about... rather a lot. I did get told stories about busy days when the ushers are too busy trying to get people into the theater to do more than constant ticket-ripping or program-handing-out or stuff. This is good; flexible professional demeanor is, I think, a good quality. Or something.
3. It might be prudent to bring something to do in the future for when I'm in the back room during the show. Unless I'd want to actually watch it, I'd spend the time back there doing... whatever presents itself. Again, this time mostly I spent it talking to people, but in the future I won't necessarily know anyone else. Until I do.
4. There is a technique to ticket ripping. Well, I assume there's more than one, but I was shown one the guy called "flick and rip." (Apparently once you get good enough at it you can rip as you flick, which would cut time down by about half...) I have much room for improvement, of course, but I caught on quickly enough to keep audience members from waiting impatiently as I struggled to rip the stubs off their tickets...
4a. Please nobody hand a theater usher a stack of tickets that are all facing different directions. The stubs have to be aligned to be ripped all at once, and it's time-consuming (and a little annoying) to have to fix them before ripping. On the other hand, if you have multiple tickets, it does go faster if you hand them over in a stack. Just don't try to be sneaky and have more people than tickets in the stack.
All in all... I am very happy I managed to get this job. I think I shall enjoy it quite a lot.
Also: I was introduced to Flight of the Conchord, a New Zealand...ish... er? New Zealander? New Zealish? Uh... yeah. A duo from New Zealand. Comedy duo with guitar and song. I'm actually rather impressed; they're funny, yeah, but mostly I love how well they work together. They barely even look at each other, and yet are exactly together when the song demands it. And! I found I recognized one of their songs. I recognized it from Calumet. One of the years, during the Staff Show, two of the counselors did their song Jenny: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlYkIJVguCU. So I knew how it went already, but it was still funny. I was actually introduced with this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbbxA8a_M_s. I'm currently scouring youtube for more.
In other news, today I read chapter 13 of my AP Constitutional Government textbook. It was 50 pages long. Fifty. That should not be allowed. Well--okay, I guess it can be allowed. But not when I'm expecting chapters to average 30 pages long... perhaps I should stop assuming that this book is just like my AP Amer. hist. textbook except thinner. Ah well.