I work in customer service for a theater. I am helping an older gentleman book his ticket reservation over the phone.
Caller: “Thank you so much for being patient with me. Old people aren’t very good with these things.”
Me: “That’s no problem at all. People of all ages can sometimes find it a challenge.”
Caller: “How old are you?”
Me: “I actually turn twenty next week!”
Caller: “Oh! Happy birthday!”
He came to the show a week later with flowers and a small cake for me!
I worked in technical theater in college. Often, between the end of my classes and the start of rehearsals, I’d do assignments in the fly loft, a small landing above the stage where people would work the pulleys during shows.
One afternoon in the second week of my first year, I was doing a problem set in the fly loft while students on stage were painting wall sections for the next show’s set. These were made of plywood and called flats. I tuned out the sounds of busy industry until the technical director’s exasperated voice rose above them:
Technical Director: “[Student], you cannot lift the flat while you are standing on it!”
I don’t think I’ll ever forget that particular quote.
I am a stagehand for a small theater. We have a chamber music performance today — basically a small group of musicians playing Christmas carols while the emcee invites the audience to sing along. Most of the patrons are parents with gaggles of young children.
Normally, our customers are pretty easy to manage, but tensions are running high today as there are numerous ticketing issues.
It turns out that many people bought their tickets from an unverified third party which takes their money and then books the seats on our website. If the seats they paid for are unavailable, the site books them in different seats or just takes their money and doesn’t book any tickets.
Another issue is that there are two shows: one at 11:00 am and one at 1:00 pm. Several people who bought tickets for the 11:00 am show either mix up their times or decide to come to the 1:00 pm show instead without telling us, and because it is within two hours of the show time, our ticket scanners do not detect that they are at the wrong performance.
This leads to a ton of confusion on the part of our ushers and customers.
Typically, people are very patient in these cases — this is not the first time the third-party sites have scammed our patrons, though we’ve never had this many instances in one show — but for some reason, everyone who needs to be reseated has an attitude.
One of the customers calls my manager a c***, uncaring for the hundreds of children around him. We end up having to open the balcony to reseat people and tell them it’s our “premium seating,” but some people still aren’t satisfied.
We end up having to delay the forty-five-minute show by nearly fifteen minutes because the house manager won’t let us start until she’s accommodated these customers, and since the schedule is so tight, the show can’t go longer than forty-five minutes, so they need to cut the performance short.
Moral of the story: buy your tickets through the appropriate websites, and don’t throw a hissy fit when you show up to the wrong performance.
Related:
I’ve Got A Ticket To Deride, Part 2
I’ve Got A Ticket To Deride
When I was a theater tech for my high school’s plays back in the 1990s, we had this little telephone room where the students could call our parents to let them know we were done with rehearsal and we needed to be picked up.
One day, I made my call, and while I did, the door closed behind me… and locked. I didn’t realize until I hung up. This was before cell phones, so I couldn’t get ahold of my dad once he was on the road. (My parents were divorced, and my mom lived further away.) I pounded on the door like crazy, but in the chaos of cleaning up the auditorium and getting ready to leave, no one heard me.
My dad arrived, but no one knew where I was. Someone finally heard me and was able to let me out.
I think they took the lock completely off after that as there was no point in having the room lock to begin with.
When I was in theater design, we were working on a set for the school play in the auditorium. The dressing rooms and bathrooms were being redone, so there wasn’t a doorknob on the one I was using.
One of my classmates pulled the door shut on his way out, so I had no way to open the door. I yelled for a while. Eventually, my classmate heard me and ran off to find the maintenance guy.
I stared at the door for a bit, and then I noticed all the coat hangers in the room. I thought, “Who do I think I am, MacGuyver?”
Close enough, I guess. I hooked the hanger hook around the latch, pulled it, and got the door opened.
Then, I had to go find my classmate… who proceeded to get me to lock myself in again to show him how I had gotten out!
After that and an incident where my friend was babysitting a kid who locked herself in the bathroom, I learned how to pick indoor locks. I always get a little perplexed when people end up cutting open doors with basic indoor knobs. All you need is a small flathead screwdriver.
