The theater holds about 300 people. I’m thinking maybe there were 75 people in attendance yesterday; as only a few people went out to see a one woman show a couple of hours before the Super Bowl. When I walked into the lobby you would have thought that a last minute rush on ticket sales had occurred; the box office line was long and not moving.
The computer was down.
Tickets could not be printed; or according to the two very nice, but frantic women working at the box office, they couldn’t be sold. Watching these women you would have thought the world had ended. They just didn’t know what to do. And considering that same afternoon we had witnessed a power plant explode here in CT this was hardly a problem.
So at 2:45 PM (show is at 3:00) what do you do?
You collect $20 from everyone and tell them to go sit wherever – first come, first serve; like they do at Southwest Airlines. That’s what you do. You pull out the old manual charge card machine or you write down the numbers on a piece of paper and you run the charges through later – manually. That’s what you do. This is not hard. This is common sense – something technology seems to have removed from our brains. I guess whoever designed the box office ticket sales training program forget to teach people what to do when (not if) the system fails.
Folks, stop making problems out of things that really aren’t problems. Let’s bring back common sense – perhaps even start teaching it again.
