I am not going to see a single film at the Film Fest­iv­al. I’m not much of a movie-goer at the best of times, and the idea of hav­ing to decide where I’m going to be weeks in advance in order to avoid hav­ing to sit with my knees around my ears in the back row some­where just does­n’t appeal to me at all. But I know that there are people amongst us who love the fest­iv­al. One Wel­ling­tonista has taken two weeks off work to attend as many films as pos­sible. Another­’s going to see The Room in Christ­ch­urch and Wel­ling­ton. You crazy kids and your hula hoops and your mov­ing pic­tures! 

But appar­ently not all is run­ning smoothly. We got a copy of an angry let­ter an acquaint­ance is send­ing to the fest­iv­al, and I thought I’d post it here to see if any of y’all are hav­ing sim­il­ar exper­i­ences.

To whom it may con­cern,

I write to you in response to the chaos I wit­nessed this after­noon whilst lin­ing up to buy a tick­et for a pop­u­lar film at the Embassy theatre. I know it was silly of me to expect to get a tick­et on a busy Sat­urday half an hour before the film starts, but some people choose to make these choices. What shocked me was the level of com­pet­ence involved at the box office. The whole thing seems very inef­fi­cient. I have an idea that you may find use­ful or not. Why not have three sep­ar­ate lines lead­ing to the three sep­ar­ate con­soles using dividers? I used to work at the Embassy and I know they have these dividers in the base­ment. If the lines are organ­ized you can then make things a lot smooth­er dur­ing peak times. Make one line for advance book­ings, one line for tick­et col­lec­tion from pre-orders, and one line for the imme­di­ate screen­ing. You can even go a step fur­ther by using a sign stat­ing the title of the film about to screen and wheth­er or not it is sold out

On anoth­er note the sys­tem used for tick­et­ing is extremely slow, frus­trat­ing and forces myself to ask the ques­tion; why do I even both­er? Are the staff or volun­teers even trained before­hand? These are a few things I hope you con­sider, after all I am just a pay­ing cus­tom­er and I do not believe that I am talk­ing just for myself.

Oh, and on a related note, can all of you film fest­iv­al goers just stick to your films and stop crowding into SMK and mak­ing it have insane wait times? Don’t come between me and my fish tacos. You won’t like me if I can­’t get pie to put in my pie­hole. Just a friendly warn­ing…