86 Box Office

My last night of managing the box office was Saturday night.
In general, I didn't mind managing the box office for the past two years. Out of all the TA jobs, I think mine was by far the easiest. Funnily enough, no one else seems to agree with me on this and apparently no one but me has ever volunteered to take on the job for a second year. But there were a lot of things I liked about working the box office. For one thing, I had no papers to grade. I also never had to attend any classes other than my own (and believe me, I love that I never had to get up to go to a 9:30 class that I was TA-ing like most of my friends). There were sometimes three weeks at a time where there was no show going on and the box office was closed and I didn't have a job to do. Did I feel a little guilty collecting my $1000 stipend during the months I didn't work more than twenty hours total? I probably should have, but honestly, no. When there was a job to do, I did it well. I literally wrote the manual for my job. And when there wasn't a job to do, I was just grateful that I had the easiest teaching assistantship. The fact that I could do 80% of my job over the phone (Call the box office, make sure someone is actually there working, and my job is done for the afternoon!) made me very happy.

That's not to say that the job was without it's frustrations, though. Who could forget Handjob Guy, for example? Or the student who called the box office last week asking if we still had tickets available for "Mucho Aw-doe"...instead of Much Ado About Nothing, the show we were actually selling tickets for. And then there were the students that worked for me. While most of them were great, and it was a very good way for me to get to know the undergrads, a few of them were irresponsible or just plain stupid. For instance, we have a policy that a certain amount of ushers can watch the show on the night they work, and last week one of the ushers asked, "Can I watch the show tonight?" I said, "Sure," and he said, "When?" It took all my willpower not to roll my eyes at him as I answered, "When it STARTS." There were definitely people I would have fired if I could have done so.
I think Saturday night was the icing on the cake, though, the epitome of the ridiculous part of my job. All of the Intro to Fine Arts students--and I think every student in the university has to take Intro to Fine Arts--have to write at least one critique of a play each semester, and they need to prove that they actually saw the play by attaching a show program to their critique. Needless to say, we get a lot of students showing up to try to get programs without actually seeing the show, so the house manager and I have a policy about not giving out programs except to people actually entering the theater with a ticket.
So Saturday night just after the show had started a guy walked up to the box office and told us he'd seen the show the night before but he didn't get a program, and could we please give him one? Amanda explained our policy of not giving out programs and the pointed out to him that if he had been at the show the night before he would have been given a program for sure. So then he quickly switched his story to, "Well, I had one, but I left it here at the theater." But we told him sorry, there was nothing we could do for him unless he came back with his ticket stub proving he had been there. And incidentally, I am positive that he hadn't been there the night before. That's what happens when you're a freakishly muscular yet somehow still attractive 6'4" black guy with lots of tattoos. Sorry buddy, but you're very noticeable and I would have remembered you.
Anyway, he started whining about having to come back with a ticket stub, so to be nice Amanda suggested, "Well, maybe if you could tell us something about the plot, to prove that you saw it...?" He stood there for a moment and finally said, "Well, I know it's by, uh, Shakespeare, and..." Realizing that a plot synopsis was going to be too much for him, I said, "What about the set? Could you tell us what the set looked like?" And let me just point out that the set for this show had a lot of very memorable elements: trees made out of gigantic grapes, a ten foot tall wine glass, paintings that flew in and out, etc. If he had actually seen the show he would have been able to come up with SOMETHING. Instead he just stood there for a full minute, even making a big show of closing his eyes like he was trying oh-so-hard to remember. Finally he sighed and said, "I was as throwed when I saw it as I am right now, so I don't really remember." So Amanda and I told him sorry and he groaned and said, "Alright, I'll get a ticket. I think it's in my notebook where I wrote down the plot and all that shit." So not only did he admit that he was "throwed" when he supposedly saw the show, but also that if he did see the show he was taking notes during it, which is another thing we really frown upon. God.
Maybe he came back the next morning with a ticket stub that he'd borrowed from a friend who actually saw the show. I don't know. If he actually made the effort to find a ticket, Amanda told me she would give him a program. But when I told her the story, Debbie realized that he is her student and she'll be reading his critique carefully and I'm fairly certain he won't be getting credit anyway. Ha. What an asshat.

So yeah. It was a good job, but I can't say I'm really going to miss it.