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…