By Kenneth Shipp
Work at Nerd Union long enough and you’ll definitely hear about the infamous steak incident. However I’m not going to let that story out of the bag just yet. I may get ripped about that one fiasco constantly, but I’ll be the one to tell the story when I darn well choose. That being said, it’s ironic that I offered and the other staff writers agreed to let me buy the tickets to one of the most important movie releases in recent memory, and that’s where we will begin…
I had post-it note after post-it note on my work desk. I set alarms on my phone and I told multiple people not named Kyle, Trevor, Zach or Jerry to remind me to buy the darn tickets. But I told everyone to remind me around 8. I had failed to take into account the tickets could go on sale early. And to be honest, I think all of us had, but that’s neither here nor there. While I hadn’t planned on being rude at dinner Monday night, I had my phone ready just in case. Suddenly, I get a rush of texts and phone calls which only meant one things: The ticket race was on.
Here’s the next spot where we almost screwed up: I didn’t tell anyone I was trying to buy the tickets on my cell. I had the freaking Fandango seating chart up during one attempt, but received another frantic phone call which cut off my data. As I attempted to message for everyone to stop freaking calling me, I could no longer log into the site. Fandango had officially crashed. At this juncture, multiple plans were hatched, Zach would attempt to keep trying on his phone, Jerry was going to drive to a theater and grab tickets, but I had no ETA. I realized how close I was to the actual IMAX we would be watching the film at. I left a half-eaten salad, dragged a friend in my car and flew down the interstate.
Once we got to the theater, I kid you not, a front parking spot opened up at Opry Mills mall (Middle Tennesseans will understand the magnitude of that happening). It was like the heavens opened up and I heard a voice say, “tickets will be ordered this day” I blocked traffic behind me as we waited for that spot to open and dared anyone to even think about taking it. But once we were in inside, we encountered another problem: kiosk versus online orders. As I made it into the lobby and started to register for tickets, seats where vanishing faster than the screen could update (so clearly Fandango was working for some people).
I attempted to include the other writers in the seating process, but at that moment, we were basically doing damage control. I grabbed the best seats for 9 people…holy crap, I bought tickets for 9 people. Yeah, that’s the other thing, we almost didn’t make that work. At the time of purchase there were probably less than 20 tickets left for the Thursday showing. Somehow there was a block of 4 and 5 decent seats together and again, like a light shining down on those, we struck. As they started printing, I let out some incomprehensible shout and received two head nods of approval from the front desk, and stares of concern from normal folks. Crisis averted!!
I’m glad to have avoided more public humiliation from the staff (maybe now I can get that ridiculous Mole Man stipulation written out of my contract) I never expected that the best solution in that situation was going to be just straight up driving to the movie theater. Hey, whatever works right? Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to add about 20,000 more views to that trailer between here and Dec 17th.
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