As you may have gleaned from previous entries in this series, I wasn’t the best employee the Angelika Film Center ever had. I like to think my cheery customer service skills counteracted everything else I did or didn’t do during the course of a workday, but that still tied me for Shittiest Employee of the Week with roughly a third of the staff.

And honestly, those cheery customer service skills didn’t actually endear me so much to my employers, insomuch as I was usually willing to help serve customers in ways that were in direct violation of Angelika corporate policy. I couldn’t care less if, for example, someone wanted to bring in a cup of coffee (“Come on, it’s our fault for not selling coffee”) or a sandwich (“Come on, it’s our fault for not selling sandwiches”) or a six-pack of Miller High Life (“Come on, he was going to give me one”).

Some employees were rabid about busting anyone who had the gall to sneak into a movie without paying. Me, not so much. If a manager told me to go walk into a theater and check someone’s ticket, I was twice as likely to congratulate them for sneaking by the ticket-takers as I was to throw them out. Of course, I was about fifty times more likely to just walk into the theater, watch two minutes of Slumdog Millionaire, then walk back out and shrug out an “I dunno” to my boss.

There is one incident in particular that I’m not especially proud of that involved a screening of the critically acclaimed Oscar-bait Doubt. Every once and awhile I’d draw the short straw and have to clean out a theater between screenings (quick aside to folks who leave half-empty popcorn bags and soda cups in movie theater seats: you are what is wrong with America). One time I walked into a theater a little bit early and decided to hang out and see the last couple minutes of the film. What I saw was a couple of nuns sitting on a bench, one of whom was Meryl Streep, one of whom wasn’t. The one who was Meryl Streep turns to the other one and tearfully exclaims “Oh, Sister, I have such… Doubt." Then startlingly loud church organ music, and then credits.

Now, I heard lots of good things about this film, and I know Meryl Streep is an amazing actress, but while there may not be an explicit law that says your movie’s a piece of garbage if it ends with the lead actor saying the film’s title then it should at least be an unstated rule of thumb. This surely didn’t matter to the room full of people who’ve just had their emotions lawnmowered by two hours of heavy drama, and to whom the line was probably a huge catharsis. But I’d missed that crucial one hour fifty nine minutes and thirty seconds, and there was just something about the way she said it. You could practically hear the italics in her voice. A thousand things spring to mind: Robert DeNiro turning towards the camera and saying “A lot of crazy things happen to you when you’re a ... Taxi Driver."

So yeah, I burst into laughter. Rather loud, choking laughter. I caught myself after just a second, but probably not before ruining the ending of the movie for whoever was sitting on the right side of the theater. And then I got to stand by the aisle with my little broom and dustpan while everyone filed out, glaring at me as I waited to clean up their spilled nachos and snuck-in beer cans.

(I mostly just kicked all that stuff under the seats. That’s what they taught me during my first week on the job.)