Sorry guys, I wrote out a very long response giving details and it didn't post after I clicked "post message." I'm sending this as a trial and then will edit it & try again.
OK, here I go again.
Upon entering, the scanner was quite rude but that's not even relevant to the story.
I bring in a group of 40 people, most of them 13 year olds. By the way, they were at all times extremely well behaved and appropriate - there is no issue with the fact they are kids. However, because they are kids, I am responsible for them. So, the scanner takes the 40 tickets and they start to enter. I am counting each one to make sure I haven't lost anybody and I ask the kids to go to the far right of that inner foyer and wait until we are all together as a group. The scanner hands me back the tickets that are all arranged in order by row and seat number. All of a sudden, there is a commotion while I am still counting and kids are still entering. I hear someone ask "Where are the tickets?" and I show them in my hand but my attention is still on making sure all the kids are in. A man from the theater grabs the tickets out of my hand without talking to me or saying anything and (apparently) tells the kids to follow him but I am not aware of that as I had to turn back to see the last few enter. I thought he was just looking at the tickets. When I turn back around again, the kids are gone. I go into the theater and there is a bit of chaos going on. The tickets had been given to two ushers. The ushers were extremely rude and nasty to me and the group. I tried to tell them that we had most of the seats in three successive rows. If they could just point out which rows were our three, I would get the kids into the rows. Neither one would give me an answer. It was so frustrating. I asked repeatedly and they just answered back rudely without answering that basic question. Then one usher told the kids to go in this row and another told the kids to go in that row and I knew that one had to be wrong but they wouldn't listen to me so in the end everyone had to get up and move and be reseated anyway.
So, when the kids had to move into the correct rows, I asked the ushers just to tell me which seats should we fill up. Again, they refused to tell me. They just needed to say "105-113" or something like that. I was getting so frustrated. So I went to the other aisle and finally found two really nice ushers who managed to get the tickets back from the really nasty ushers. In two seconds, they looked at the tickets and told me the seat numbers and I was able to help the kids get to the right places. I don't know why it was so difficult with the first two ushers.
So, I say to the nice usher lady, "This all started when this really rude man from the theater grabbed my tickets and led the kids away from me. If I had entered the theater with the group, I don't think this confusion would have happened. I would have said to the ushers, we have three rows, here are the tickets, etc. I'd like to speak with the House Manager to tell him about this." So she tells me where to find him and you guessed it. The rude man WAS the house manager. I did try to talk to him (Mr. Levine) but he would not let me talk.
He did tell me each person should have been holding their own ticket. Having no experience leading groups of kids into the theater before, I thought it made more sense to hold them and just go find our three rows and let the kids sit anywhere in the three rows. If I ever did it again, I would organize it differently, for sure. But there was still no excuse for the arrogance and rudeness that we experienced and also the potential safety issues it created when the house manager separated me from the group and the kids in the group from each other. In this economy, I think they should treat people alittle nicer that bring in thousands of dollars of business.
Anyway, I want to let some powers that be know how the theater patrons are being treated. We were a polite, well-behaved group that wasn't doing anything wrong. Maybe I could have organized things better but I do not think I should have experienced that type of rudeness.
Updated On: 3/2/09 at 09:58 PM
