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On December 30th, 2009 (yes, New Year’s Eve Eve) I headed out of town to a local hockey game. I can only suspect that this was a freebie, likely handed down courtesy of my friend Huss from his seldom-used work/client tickets. The Sens lost to Colorado by a score of four to three.
But the thing that really knocks me out about this ticket is the altered start time. As is clear from the ticket stub, the game was originally scheduled to start at 7:30, but for some reason the game just had to start half an hour earlier than originally planned. Actually, that might be wrong. It could be that the game was supposed to start at seven pm all along but someone had made a mistake and the wrong time had been printed on all the tickets. Either way, clearly a correction was in order.
And can you believe, in this modern pixelated world of bits, bytes, instant downloads, wireless streaming, iPads, modems, Scratch & Sniff and the Dewey Decimal System – heck, they even have wi-fi on the bus now – that someone had to physically go through stacks of tickets armed with nothing but a ballpoint pen and correct each ticket by hand?!?!
Crazy! The arena holds over twenty thousand people; imagine the hand-cramps! How long that must have taken, and over the holidays no less! And amazingly enough, her handwriting* held up (or not; for all I know this was the first ticket she fixed).
And why did they have to switch the time of the puck drop anyways? Is it because the next day was a work day? Like a half-hour is going to make a difference one way or the other. I’m guessing it made a pretty big difference to the poor girl with the good penmanship (penpersonship?).
Hmmm. Maybe they threw the monumentally tedious task at the person who was responsible for the error in the first place…or maybe the errer (as in: one who errs) simply took things into their own hand and switched the tickets before their boss noticed the problem.
In which case: nice initiative.
In the end all I can really do is tip my hat to the unnamed soldier who went out of their way to get me to the game on time.
*We can all agree that it looks like the handwriting of a female person, right? Isn’t it odd that handwriting is so often gender-identifiable? I know I could never, ever pass off my own handwriting as that of a lady’s.
Todd Man Out 