The curse of the drinking classes

It was never going to be a good day. I'd spent the previous day assigned to the most hated of all the positions at [cinema], the ice cream stand, for 10 hours. It's on the other side of the foyer from the gate and concessions so opportunities for chatting and mucking about are severely minimised. It also gets the least custom of any sales point in the cinema. So you spend most of the day so bored that you consider gouging your eyes out with a spoon just to break the tedium, except for two frantic periods when everyone wants their ice cream at once and no one has the patience to wait while you try and sculpt the perfect company-regulated scoop from rock hard ice cream with a rapidly-freezing implement.

That particular day, at the height of busy period number two, a group of six tourists were at the front of the queue. A group of six tourists that all wanted sundaes, the most difficult thing to make. A group of six tourists that hadn't made their minds up as to what they wanted by the time they got to the stand. A group of six tourists that only included one English speaker. My fury was only slightly abated by being able to ask them agressively if they wanted crushed nuts only to be enthusiastically answered by two of the girls with a chorus of 'Crushed nuts! Crushed nuts!'. I'm a simple creature.

10 hours of ice cream scooping take their toll. By the end of the day my arm felt like that of a teenaged boy who'd just spent the weekend indulging in the pleasures of the palm. And however careful you are, you can't help but get ice cream all over your hand and arm. The chocolate ice cream is particularly bad for this and I didn't realise until I got a funny look whilst standing outside smoking that it had clung to me making me look like I'd just finished fisting a tramp.

So, after that ordeal, I was hoping for a quiet and uneventful stint ushering the next day. This was not to be. Before I started working for [cinema], a cinema usher conjured up images of a pin up girl with a torch and refreshment tray, probably wearing an apron that almost covered her stocking tops and drawn by Gil Elvgren. Unfortunately this couldn't be further from the truth. An usher's job is to clean the rubbish from the screens between film showings (on school holidays this is no simple job, I've seen farmyard muck heaps more clean and presentable than Screen 4 after a packed out showing of Step Up 2: The Streets) and field idiotic enquiries from the public on the gate. As my first customer approached me I braced myself and heard the worst, "Er, I think someone's been sick in Screen 8".

I ran to get a manager who appeared bizarrely chirpy about the potential pile of puke awaiting us. "It'll be fine, we've got sick kits that have gloves and disinfectant and a chemical that you pour onto the sick and it turns it to crystals that you can easily pick up," she explained. Great. Only on arriving at the ushers' cupboard we discovered a distinct lack of sick kits. Manager's chirp level lessened. And so we proceeded to screen 8 armed only with a bucket of disinfectant, a role of blue roll and a bin bag. When the customer said someone had been sick she wasn't lying, my god had someone been sick.

Immediately upon opening the doors we found a small pile covered in napkins. That was quickly followed by the discovery of a trail leading all the way up the gangway. This was all on the carpet and so we set to disinfecting and scrubbing it. The question, "Do you think that's it?", was barely out of my mouth when I saw something at the end of one of the rows of seats. It looked like Vesuvius had erupted, it was a volcano of vomit. Popcorn boxes lay around the chair empty while effluvia seeped into every nook and cranny around the seat. This was too much. Manager's chirp ran out of the room holding its nose. We called for back up. After far too many minutes spent in the stench, Grafton Security came through with a sick kit. Such was the volume of bodily fluid that the special crystallising chemical was rendered ineffective, merely turning it into an even gloopier mess. The special shovel broke under the pressure. Half a bin bag appeared to be filled by the end.

Occasionally I have cause to step back from a situation and assess my life. And so it was that I saw myself in a baseball cap, passing blue roll to my manager as she stalwartly shovelled sick into a see-through bin bag while 'Pray' by Take That played in the cinema and an advert for discounts proclaimed loudly across the screen, "You'll wish you could be a student all your life". Truly, at that point I knew I had reached the dizzy heights. However, apparently anything is possible at the cinema and things could have been worse. "This is the worst case of sick I've ever seen," said manager, "but at least it's not as bad as when there was shit on the mirror". I stared at her aghast as I was shown a picture on her mobile of the gents' toilets' mirror smeared with excrement. So I suppose it could have been worse. And no, there isn't a shit kit.