Yesterday I was in a meeting that got very technical between two other people, and therefore had nothing to do with me. So I decided to take care of something else on my to-do list:  buy tickets for a play my friend and fellow playwright David and I wanted to see on Sunday night. This would be a good time to do that, and I wanted to make sure to get it done, because the venue is about the size of a walk-in closet, and the show would sell out. While the others were figuring out the precise process they were going to take to handle the complicated technical thing, I opened up my laptop and went to the website of the theatre in question, pulled out my credit card, and then entered all the relevant information and hit purchase.

And then the screen froze.

To be exact, not my laptop screen. I still had full access to everything else. The payment-processing page of their website froze.

I waited and I waited some more, then finally I quit that browser. What else was there to do? Nothing.

Then three things happened: 

1. I got a text from Amex saying that my credit card had been charged for $75.50 by the theatre in question. Great! The ticket sale went through.
2. Then I got an automated email from the theatre’s payment processor saying, You abandoned your cart! Come back and purchase your tickets.
3. I realized it would now be up to me to invest the time in straightening this out. Which is precisely the way of things now:  Commerce is made fast and easy; customer service is all on you personally.

Immediately, I checked the theatre’s Contact Us page to see whom I could call. Answer:  not really anyone. They don’t keep business hours. (Understandable for a small operation.)

Nexte thing:  see who I could email. Welp, I could email the box office, but the site states: “Please allow 24-48 hours for a response from our box office.” In which time the show would have sold out or have already ended.

But I took that chance and emailed the box office an image of my credit-card transaction clipped from my Amex transaction page and explained that their system had frozen but I was coming to the show, and then cc’d someone else listed on the site who seemed to be an administrator.

A few hours later I was surprised and delighted to get an email. What it said was, “It looks like your charge is pending. Would you like to pay at the door?”

Well, no. Because the charge wasn’t pending:  It had gone through. So I sent them another screenshot, this time of the payment having gone through.

I checked again later and saw that now they had credited back my charge. By this time, it was six in the evening and I was having drinks at a business event on a Hollywood rooftop. I thought, Well, that’s one way to resolve it, I’ll just go back to the site and buy the tickets again. I set my drink aside to do that and pulled out my phone to order, but now found that I could buy only one ticket. Why? Because, sure enough, the show is in demand and now there was only one ticket left.

The woman next to me, with whom I’d shared this whole story while awaiting my drink, saw this happen and said, “Why don’t you just buy that one ticket for yourself and tell your friend something happened and you can’t go?”

This is how, it seems, some people think and behave. It explains a lot.

Instead, I went ahead and bought two tickets for Sunday, and confirmed with David. I messaged him that we were on for the show, but now the tickets were for Sunday.

He later told me that his first text back to me had been in error:  When he said he was available, he’d meant to say Sunday. Not Friday.

Good thing I never got those tickets for Friday.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 28th, 2026 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.