Well, Excuse Us For Following Directions

I purchased tickets to a small community theater production in my area. Instead of will-call like they used to do, the tickets were emailed to me as a PDF. Yay, electronic tickets — progress! But no. Each ticket was a separate page that consisted of a small QR code and a bunch of ads. At the top of each 8.5 by 11 page was the large bold text, “This is your ticket. Print this entire page and bring it with you to the event.”

It seemed silly not to be able to use the electronic copy on my phone or to at least only print the QR code section from all the tickets in my group on a single page and ditch the ads, but I didn’t want to take any chances. I don’t travel around with a printer to be able to print the full page if they reject the other options, and we wanted to see the show we’d paid for.

Apparently, most other people had the same thought, as we were all there with our full-page tickets.

The young ticket scanners started complaining, getting louder and louder with each patron showing up with their printouts.

Ticket Scanner #1: “You are all so wasteful!”

Ticket Scanner #2: “Can’t you get with the program and use electronic tickets?!”

In their eyes, we were horrible old people who were stupid and didn’t care about the environment.  

Finally, one patron had enough and marched right up to them, handed them their ticket, and pointed to the words at the top.

Patron: “I want you to read these words out loud. And then, I want you to apologize for your snide comments!”

The next time I got tickets from that particular theater group, the tickets still had that phrase at the top, but the email they were attached to had a section that told us that, despite what it actually said on the PDF, patrons were welcome to just display the QR code on their mobile device if they wished. Apparently, they had purchased the ticketing template/system from a third party but no one had bothered to read the whole page until they had a bunch of insulted patrons.