Zeze and I decided to go see “Return of the King” again yesterday as it was our day off and it sounded like something fun…
We got to the local theater during the matinee times and both of us got in for about ten bucks. We decided to pick up some munchies for the show; a small popcorn, two sodas, and a bag of candy. $17 dollars later we were sitting in a half filled theater, which is pretty impressive considering the movie has been out for *months* now.
This is when things went south: All the previews were missing the center channel so there were no real vocals, just lots of effects sounds.
We sat there, cringing at the static pops and crunching coming from the sound system up until the movie started. We were hoping that the problems were caused by whatever gear they were using and the movie would be ok… Nope.
If Peg sees this; yep, the theater still sucks sound wise…
Zeze gets up to go hunt down someone to fix it and the theater staff fiddles with it all the way though the Gollem sequence at the beginning of the movie and as Gollem shows up to wake Sam and Frodo, the projector stops…
Zeze and I go to get our money back and on the way we encounter another movie patron who is doing the same. She’s an older lady wearing elvish leaves earrings and Zeze starts up a conversation with her out of the blue… Zeze does that.
We wind up talking with this lady in the lobby for over an hour. It turns out that she’s been recently laid off from Oracle as her QA job has just as recently been sent to India. She’s very happy to talk with us, nerd to nerd, for a while as she’s now working at Home Depot where her co-workers wouldn’t know a computer from a sheet of plywood.
Her biggest worry is the fact that Home Depot doesn’t give you benefits for over a year…
She worked for Oracle for over 20 years, has won several awards for the performance of her job, and was well thought of in the big building on the beltway… But in the end it all meant nothing in light of cheap labor in a country where there is no OSHA, no EPA, no unions, and no standard of living…
In the end we went our separate ways and I was happy to have met another decent human being. I had heard a lot about the IT industry being out-sourced to India, but had never actually met anyone who had suffered this and it struck me. I also ended up pondering the fact that it’s not just the money these folks lose, but the loss of health care benefits they lose for a year or more that really sucks. This day and age a person simply -can’t- afford to go see a doctor without the power of some HMO behind them…
I hope she makes it ok. I really hate to see bad things happen to good people, especially when there are so many bad people out there that it could have happened to instead.