2009.6 My Career at Universal Studios
I didn't work very long at Universal Studios, but in my short career there, one day stands out.
I was walking to the office from the huge parking lot when I saw a man in a cape (above) and a bunch of other people also in costume, all looking up at the towers. I recognized the caped one as Lorne Greene, the dad in Bonanza. (In those days Robert Blake used to always talk about the suits in the towers on the Tonight Show). I looked up to see what Lorne Greene et al were so interested in. It turns out a woman was threatening to jump - which apparently had somehow disrupted the shoot for Battlestar Galactica - unless she could talk to this woman:
So let's see, there's an actual distressed human being, so disturbed she is going to jump off the Universal Tower unless someone can get Wonder Woman to come up and talk to her. There are a bunch of people dressed as starship crew looking up at her. I'm walking through this to a workbench where the entire day is spent listening to people tell jokes about other local unions by number (the guys in #47 ...) and making phone calls to the Burbank Studios to see if there are other union job openings there.
I quit after something like two weeks of being paid for doing almost nothing for the union negotiated 34.67 hours each week. When I gave notice, the woman in charge of personnel said "Come with me." and starting walking at a fast pace down the hall. We entered an office with nothing but filing cabinets, dozens of them. "You see these files?" she said. She opened a drawer in one and rifling through the papers she continued: "Every one of these files is an application to work here and you want to quit after only a few days. You must be nuts!"
Working at Universal Studios was unforgettable, but I learned that there is a Hell and there are ways to lose your soul if such a thing exists. It leads me to my next anecdote about two couples: T., J., and the Hooker.
