Serenity Tickets Arrived

After a fortnight away in the faraway land of France, I returned home at about 3AM. Leaping into the pile of post by the door, I rummaged through until I found what I was looking for. Two tickets for the World Premiere of Joss Whedon’s “Serenity”.

When the Edinburgh International Film Festival launched its ticket sales several weeks ago, they clearly had no idea that “Serenity” was to become one of the most successful films the Festival had ever seen. 44,000 people flooded in to purchase tickets to the event, in the end resulting in nothing more than a complete crash of the web server, and jammed phone lines. The EIFF simply couldn’t cope with the demand. As some people grumbled and gave up, others swore at each other, but others (myself included) continued to attempt to make bookings despite being bombarded by error messages. After boxing around these for several hours, I managed (even after it had “Sold Out”) to get two tickets into my basket. I suspect this was because during the confusion, overbookings had occurred, and tickets were being released.

Anyway, with the golden jewels now in my basket, I hurried to the checkout, only to get slapped quite violently in the face by the site’s mathematical incompetence. It, for reasons unfathomable to me, was adding £7.95 to £7.95 and getting £64.23 or some such improbable figure.

Now, after having waited several hours for something I desperately wanted, I was most short-tempered. I bypassed the ticket hotline and phoned the EIFF’s General Information line. Thankfully, the operator there was most sympathetic, and I managed to get redirected to someone high up in the EIFF staff. They explained what was happening (though they hadn’t actually seen the addition error before) and offered to put through my tickets manually. They did so, and I’m now the happy owner of two Serenity tickets.

I just feel for others who weren’t as fortunate as I on the day, but I must praise the good-natured phone operators – good job coping with 44,000 people!

So Sci-Fi Heaven has a pass to the World Premiere of Serenity in a few weeks, with several big names rumoured to be attending – expect the inside scoop then!