I had done it! I had finally landed my first real job in IT, leaving the faded clown-wig colors of my public access television career behind. I was going to be an IT Field Tech for a local Midwestern movie theater company, Kerasotes. The Kerasotes family had started their movie theater empire down in Springfield, Illinois about 80 years before I got there. They owned about 50 locations in Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Ohio, amongst others. I was moving from television to movies, and I couldn’t wait for what I imagined would be the glitz and glamour of having a Hollywood-adjacent job.
We had a field office out of a Showplace 16 theater in Bolingbrook, Illinois. I lived 40 miles away in Evanston, about a 2-hour commute, each way. Every other week we would hit the road, visiting chain theaters to upgrade or fix broken technology. Since we couldn’t work when the theater was open, the job required long days and even longer nights. Early on, I remember waiting in back offices for those damned 10:00pm showings to complete. I’m pretty sure the people seeing the late night show of “I Heart Huckabees” had to be nudged awake when the house lights failed to do the job.
My job consisted of replacing servers that were flaking out, and, a personal favorite, troubleshooting broken point-of-sale (POS) consoles at the concession stands. Knowing that the keys are wrapped in a plastic sheath could give you an idea of what I was in for. Years of spilled Coke and Movie Theater Butter™ were caked under the console, flowing down the hole in the counter where the ethernet cables ran, and coating the cables themselves. After a few of these experiences, I couldn’t eat at my hometown movie theater’s concessions any more.
While field tech was my official title, the real job consisted of drinking Monster Energy drinks and road tripping with my colleagues Vince and Gene. Colleagues is too strong of a word here, they were more of co-instigators. We had a blast driving around the Midwest, visiting theaters, and spending our per diems. As usual, I resigned myself to the back seat of our huge rented SUV, listening to them go on about all kinds of things, mostly discussions about “beef curtains” or giving a girl the “Spiderman”. I listened to a lot of Eminem in that back seat, and it was also where I was introduced to Modest Mouse.
The movie theater business was the career for some very strange folks. As the adage says, “you get what you pay for”, and Kerasotes didn’t pay much. The theater managers, a unique set of individuals that manage teenagers, were weirdos. They were in this game for the same reason I was, the movie biz. As adjacent as it was to Hollywood, there was some romanticism to it all. Still, it was surprising to see the egos of folks making 27k a year.
One of the best parts of the job was building brand-new Showplace 16 theaters. We would get to the new theater construction sites right when the drywall was finished, but before the tile guys started the concessions. Our primary job consisted of building out a server rack, complete with point-of-sale and video camera servers, network switches, punch down plates for RJ-45, and redundant power supplies. Once the rack was ready, we ran all the ethernet cables for computers and point-of-sale.
One of my first road trips was to the Trader’s Point buildout of a Showplace 16 outside of Indy. When we got there in the late afternoon, we discovered our pallet inside a shipping container. The built-out crew would hoist it with a forklift through an industrial door to the second floor, where we’d install the servers and where the projector booth was located. The knobby-wheeled, industrial forklift they used was on the other side of the building, and we agreed to go grab it for them. When we got there, I said, “Let me drive this thing”. I got behind the wheel and tore across the unfinished parking lot, taking a joy ride that still sits with me today. After I got it out of my system, I drove it to the other side of the building, where no one was the wiser.
We would then work into the night, putting together the server rack, drilling holes in concrete for lag screws, pulling ethernet cable into runs that would spiderweb through the entire building via chase pipes. I was the lightest guy on the team and the tallest, so I got the privilege of using the 30-foot scissors jack to reach the cables on the ceiling. The wallboard guys loved me because I always dented their fresh plaster. Around 2-3am we would knock off for the night, hit Meijer for snacks, then retire to our Hampton Inn by the highway. These first days were killer, since I would be up at 6am that day, do a 2-hour commute to the field office, then the road trip, then finally get to work once the 9-5ers were done.
This was the start of my second career after working in television for over a dozen years. By now, at 37 years old, pulling second shifts after already full days was grueling. Field work meant many hours in work boots standing on a concrete floor. We would often get back to the field office late Thursday nights / early Friday mornings, unloading our truck of heavy tools and heavy servers. After that came the drive home, threading my way through four of Chicago’s busiest interchanges. My bleary eyes and exhaustion meant I should have been decapitated by the trailer of a semi after nodding off at 65 mph. Somehow, I always made it home.
Then I got a pager.
Being on call meant I became more than an IT guy. Sometimes the tickets were easy: rebooting a server or walking a theater manager through a fix while watching them over the security cameras. Other times, my phone would ring at two in the morning because a manager’s end-of-day count was off by five dollars. I wasn’t troubleshooting technology anymore. I was somehow expected to arbitrate company policy from two hundred miles away.
One early-morning call still sticks with me. A frantic manager insisted the POS system was wrong because it reported one fewer hot dog than his inventory count. He had an extra hot dog. Summoning whatever logic I could at three in the morning, I said, “Could you put the hot dog in the safe and show it to the regional manager when he gets there next week?” There was a long pause before he agreed that this was, in fact, a reasonable solution.
Somewhere along the line I’d become part help desk, part therapist, and part amateur corporate arbitrator for people who were absolutely terrified of the loss prevention department.
For six months I loved the weirdness of it all. I loved the road trips, the new theater buildouts, and the feeling that I was seeing parts of the business moviegoers never knew existed.
Add in a four-hour commute, overnight installations, and a pager that could go off at two in the morning over an extra hot dog, though, and I started asking myself whether this was the life I wanted for the next ten years. I didn’t regret taking the job. It got me into IT, and it gave me stories I’ll probably tell for the rest of my life.
I asked for a transfer to the corporate office. Vince and Gene barely acknowledged me on my last day in Bolingbrook. I don’t think they understood that, for me, this was never going to be a destination. I had left public access television because I wanted to build a career in technology. Instead, I found myself helping turn fifty unique movie theaters into fifty identical ones. There was satisfaction in the work, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I was becoming a specialist in a world that only existed inside one company’s walls.
I traded the road for a desk. After a short stint in Kerasotes’ corporate office, I left for a help desk position elsewhere. It wasn’t that I hated the theater work, I just couldn’t keep living on Monster Energy drinks, late nights, and dead-end opportunities.