My last blog post was about the movies.  I wrote that I am not a big fan of the movies because of the dialog being hard to understand. I am looking forward to trying captions in a movie theater. So what do I do over the Thanksgiving weekend, attend a movie.  My husbands birthday was on Black Friday.  I partook in the shopping frenzy with my daughter and Mother in-law.  We arrived back to my in-laws house to find my husband laying in bed looking bored.  Asked him what he wanted to do, he responded the movies.  Sure lets go, we have built in babysitters here.  Let’s head to the movies.

Instead of going to our local theater we went to a large national chain theater that was nearby. What happened next just shocked us both.  I noticed they had a sign for the assistive listening devices, the headphones.  They don’t work for me, not enough decibels  That was fine I was doing this for my husband.  We went to go get some popcorn (which is way to expensive) and there was a manager standing there.  My husband looked at me and suggested we ask him if they happen to have captions available.  His answer should have been a simple NO.  The answer we got was “No, captions are a pain.  You need to have paperwork and signatures.  It is a pain to try and please everyone.”  I was shocked to say the least and my husband was mad.  We just looked at each other in amazement and went into the movie.  I couldn’t get this out of my head.  Would this manager dare say to some individual in a wheelchair that it is a pain to have a ramp or a row of seats that they could fit into.  I ended up leaving the movie to go back out to talk to the manager.  I wanted to know what this paperwork was, did I have to fill something out?  When asked this their response was, “No, it is just a pain and we have nothing to offer you.”  I inquired about the assistive listening devices wondering if they even had them and again I was told, “we have nothing to offer you.”

How do I deal with this?  It has been near a week and I am still in shock.  I have worked at numerous jobs where I deal with people and customer service.  I would never dare tell someone that they are a pain and what they are asking for is burdensome.  I am really hoping that this manager was shocked by the amount of people at the movies that day and was just stressed.  I really hope he doesn’t have this attitude all the time.  I wanted to give the theater time to respond before I take this further.  I want to hope this was a huge misunderstanding and there would be an apology.

I tried to contact the theater, they don’t make it easy.  Their website has a form to fill out and a manager will get back to me within 2-3 days.  Been a week haven’t heard a word.  Tried to call the theater, can’t get a regular person on the line.  I wrote a letter to the editor of the paper alerting them and educating them about this, hasn’t been published…yet.  I have now written a letter to the corporate offices for this theater chain.  They have no working email or phone number that you can contact them with.  Snail mail will have to do in this circumstance.

An experiment will be taking place this weekend.  I have a good friend who is deaf.  She communicates with me by voicing and reading lips.  I am trying to learn more sign, so we can talk through sign.  Her husband is a sign language interpreter.  They are going to go to the same movie theater as we did.  She is not going to voice only use ASL with her husband.  They are going to inquire if they have captions available at this movie theater.  Do they have anything they could offer her to use.  We are very interested in what the outcome will be.  I hope that I had a stressed out manager and they will be given good customer service, only time will tell.  I am hoping for a simple NO, we don’t offer them at this time.  We do have headphones you could try and use.

I want to give the theater time to respond before I take this further but with each passing day my blood is seeming to boil a tad bit more.  I wonder what A Day at the Movies Part 3 will have to say.