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