Murphy's Law

Murphy loves the movie business. When I used to work as a projectionist at the other theatres I ended up dreading working Tuesday. This was when everyone had a discount Tuesday so it was busy. Things always seemed to go wrong on Tuesday even though as far as operation of the booth is concerned it doesn't matter whether there's 2 or 200 people watching a film.

Here's some recent examples.

One of the motors on the platter which pays out the film was making a funny noise so I took it in to be repaired. The shop changed the bearings. When I hooked it back up it's running considerably slower that the other motors even though nothing has changed on the platter and the shop didn't change anything else.

I was away last weekend, planning to leave on Friday morning. Thursday afternoon OBSERVE and REPORT hadn't been delivered yet. I called and Technicolor thought we were picking up the print from Silver City but I was told one would be delivered. The problem with this is since it was still playing at the Silver City Thursday night it couldn't be picked up until Friday. Naturally this had to happen when I wasn't planning to be in town on Friday. I had to get one of my staff to pick up the film.

While I was away the juice fridge stopped working but no one thought to tell me until Monday night. I called Coke who showed up on Wednesday to fix it. The fan in the refrigeration unit had gotten jammed. The Coke guy fixed it and it seemed to be running fine. At the end of the night I noticed a burning smell and opened up the fridge again. The fan had stopped working completely so something must have burned out. Now I have to get Coke back in, and we'll have warm juice again.

Since we are the only place on campus that's open at night during the summer I sell hot dogs for the people that are looking for something closer to real food than popcorn. We haven't sold any since we started, not unexpected since summer school hasn't started yet. Tonight the machine wasn't working and we had two people ask for hot dogs. The rollers are sticking so I have to find out what one uses to lubricate a machine that comes in contact with food. Somehow I don't think WD-40 would work quite right...