Sunday night brought a new one.
My wife and I were going to watch A Quiet Place: Day One at the theater closest to our house. This is not the theater I usually go to, because this particular theater does not give me free tickets for my critics card, but when I go with my wife, she is usually not interested in a drive of over twice the distance just to save a few bucks.
Well, we got there and it was a madhouse.
It was the first Sunday of school holidays, but more than that, it was rainy and cold and people wanted to get the hell out of their houses, where they had presumably spent most of a rainy weekend. Would never have guessed it would be so mobbed, though, not with theatrical attendance supposedly on the wane, and with us collectively not giving a shit that it is.
The movie was to start at 6:15, and I got there about 6:05, assuming I'd have plenty of time to buy a ticket and wait for food, what with an expected 15 to 20 minutes of trailers as well. My wife needed to stop at Bunnings (our version of Home Depot) across the parking lot, so she was another ten minutes or so in joining me.
I could already tell the line for food was going to be a clusterfuck, as it had no fewer than 75 people waiting in it. But I couldn't worry about that because the first priority was snaring a ticket, which was no guarantee given the way the lobby was clogged with prospective theatergoers, many of whom were there for other movies, but a sizeable majority of whom were probably there for my movie, given the way they try to stagger start times just to avoid the very madhouse that had materialized before me.
The touch screen of the ticket kiosk I selected was shit. I had to poke it numerous times, in increasing frustration, only for it to catch up about 15 seconds later, having registered all my pushes and therefore leaving me somewhere I didn't want to be. I finally got it to cooperate enough with me to navigate through purchasing my tickets.
At which point the kiosk disgorged ... nothing.
"What the hell?" I said, looking at the people at neighboring kiosks with pleading eyes, as if they were in any position to help me.
So then I had to go be "that guy" who slows down an already slow concession line by commandeering the attention of one of the guys getting popcorns and sodas. I usually resent people like this, but that's because I assume they are just rudely being indifferent to whether they had a rightful claim to this person's attention, seeing as how they had not yet spent any time in line. Me, I quickly decided there was nothing to do but what I did, because I couldn't wait in a line 75 people deep just to get tickets that should have already been provided to me through an automated system that had failed.
The guy likely knew what the issue was, considering he didn't crinkle up his face in the universal "hmmm" expression people give you when they are confronted by a problem with an unknown solution. He said he would help me and I thought he meant it, but then he started helping the next person with their snacks, almost as though he had forgotten. The second time I reminded him, I guess he understood "Oh you mean right now?"
By this point, two others had also had their money sucked up by the machine -- metaphorically speaking because it was all on card -- with no tickets to show for it. At least, I thought it was only two others.
By the time the man had opened the machine, taken out the roll of spare paper that was stored inside the machine and fed it into the dispensing teeth, the machine started spitting out tickets like a slot machine paying out. None of us knew what seats we'd ordered -- why pay attention to a thing like that when you expect to immediately get your ticket that tells you that very thing? -- but fortunately, he could tell by the combinations of tickets who was who. He gave me a pair of tickets that seemed like they were mine, and then were confirmed as mine by the couple who had used the machine after me confirming that the next pair were theirs.
But what happened to all those people who didn't get their tickets? Did they just assume the payment had not gone through and tried again on a different kiosk? Did they, then, buy at least twice as many tickets to their movie as they intended? And how many days later would this theater still have to be dealing with their complaints, once they checked their bank statement and realized what happened?
I mean, don't you have to have a system that alerts you that the paper is about to run out? Or don't you have to be checking it at regular intervals throughout the day if you don't?
It reminded me of one of my chief complaints about the office building that we used to call home until about two weeks ago, or actually, the cleaning staff employed to work in that building. I can't tell you how many times I would go into the bathroom and find that there was no soap in the dispensers. Like, none in any of the three of them.
It's the ultimate "You had one job" moment. There should be no "run" on bathroom soap. There should be no day when a significantly larger number of people use the toilet or squirt the soap a significantly greater number of times than usual. If the soap dispenser has gone empty, you've just fallen down on the routine of your job. (And in some cases, really fallen down -- in one of my last days of work there, I had to complain to the concierge in the lobby when the dispensers had gone several days without being refilled. I mean, what kind of work rounds don't involve routine checks of the bathrooms and refilling of their consumable resources?)
I can't call out the theater staff for the same sort of inexcusable neglect. Given the way they were staffed, the way the bins were overflowing with refuse, and the way more than half the people who wanted something to eat before their movie started probably didn't get it, it looks as though they were overrun. So while it wouldn't have been their fault as individuals, perhaps it was the fault of whoever manages the theater and improperly staffed the place for a rainy Sunday evening.
We thought for sure we would be one of those more than half who did not get their food, but my wife embarked on what I thought was a fool's errand -- she ordered the pizza I had planned to order, as well as drinks for us, online from our seats. We'd get a text when they were ready.
And while this seems like a good system, it also means you have to monitor your phone constantly to be sure you don't miss the text, because you're a good enough theater patron to silence your phone so it doesn't ring out. So my wife also had to be a "that guy" in the film's first 30 minutes, checking her phone in a way that was no outwardly different from a person who couldn't go five minutes without refreshing Insta. (Fortunately, we were off to the side of one of the back rows, so there weren't that many people to scoff at us if they had been inclined to. We did ultimately get the stuff about 30 minutes in and she missed only one crucial plot detail, on which I filled her in in the parking lot.)
Speaking of scoffing, though, the occasion for me to want to scoff at others reared its head a couple times, especially in a Quiet Place film.
This was the first Quiet Place film I'd seen in the theater, having missed the first because it was released while we were in Bali for our tenth anniversary, and I couldn't quite justify using some of that precious week to walk an hour down the beach to the theater. So I'd never experienced what it was like when an entire theater full of people -- and this one was full -- tried not to add their own soundtrack to the extremely quiet one provided by the film.
One family's contribution to ruining that was having brought their young child, possibly even a baby. To be fair, that child was much better behaved than it could have been, but when I heard its gurglings at the very start of the movie, I rolled my eyes so hard I probably should set an appointment with the ophthalmologist. Who takes a young baby to see an apocalyptic movie where aliens tear humans who make noises to shreds? Plus I found myself frequently uncertain whether this soundtrack was internal or external to the movie. It'd mean quite something else if there were a baby gurgling in the background of a New York laid to waste by aliens.
Thematically speaking, I was a lot more interested in the inadvertent problem creators, such as the guy who had to make cellophane wrinkling sounds for what must have been two straight minutes at one point. I understand you have to open your packaging -- believe me, I've been there. But when I'm in those situations, I always wait for an inevitable moment of loud machinery where I can disguise the disruption I'm creating. We did get the occasional loud noises in this film, of course, but more common were periods of sometimes five to ten minutes where everyone on screen was being as quiet as they possible could be.
In fact, the movie was so generally quiet that you could even hear the leather crying out in agony as people used the buttons set into their armrests to mechanically recline their seats.
As there was no one to blame for this particular transgression, it was just amusing.
