Messed up tickets for Equus October 28, 2007

Since I was revelling in the wonders of the down south over the poya day weekend, I thought, hey, since Equus offers an over-the-phone reserving system for tickets, let me reserve some for myself for Sunday, October 28, 2007 and then pick it up and go watch it. So I call them up on Thursday, speak to one of the girls, and she confirms everything to me. I tell her that I’m out of Colombo and that a friend, who is in the play, will pick up my tickets for me. She confirms that this arrangement is fine and assures me not to worry, that my tickets are as good as bought over the counter. She takes my name and number down. I’m happy!

Friend goes over today to pick up the tickets, and discovers that there are no tickets under my name. I immediately call the Wrap Factory number, and there is a completely rude man on the other end of the line telling me that it really can’t be helped, because he doesn’t see my name under any of the tickets, so TOUGH! I try to explain to him nicely that I reserved my tickets and they were confirmed, and that maybe he needs to doublecheck his records. Then, he tells me that there were several people who reserved their tickets and never bought them, so that maybe, my tickets got sold off, since I hadn’t paid for them. Sigh! Anger kicks in. He was completely out of line, and was very rude and told me that it was my fault completely that the tickets are not available and he refused to accept responsibility for his staff, who I now hear, have messed up most of the box plan.

Tell me, should I have to compromise for their mess-ups? Why on earth should I be paying for their inefficiencies? I’m livid, because I not only do not have tickets for Equus, but had to encounter a complete jerk, who obviously didn’t know what the hell he was doing. Would you blame me for telling him to fuck off?

I also hear that have been numerous slip-ups like this, and that the last three days have seen many an irate theatre-goer having to encounter the exact same problem. I doubt those handling the people are going to take any remedial action, however, this is completely unnecessary, and if they do not know how to handle the reserving of tickets, they shouldn’t have done it in the first place.

Minneriya, August 2007 October 5, 2007

Extracting vanilla fragrance from cow dung and other things October 5, 2007

 

Nobel prizes are generally associated with high profile research, top notch personalities, stuff for the betterment of mankind, etc. So in this day and age, we have the new and improved Ig Nobel prizes.

Think what you may, but I think its a fantastic idea to recognize ultra originial research which ‘first makes people laugh, and then makes them think’. Here’s the list of winners for this year:

Medicine – Brain Witcombe, of Gloucestershire Royal NHS Foundation Trust, UK, and Dan Meyer for their probing work on the health consequences of swallowing a sword.

Physics – A US-Chile team who ironed out the problem of how sheets become wrinkled.

Biology – Dr Johanna van Bronswijk of the Netherlands for carrying out a creepy crawly census of all of the mites, insects, spiders, ferns and fungi that share our beds.

Chemistry – Mayu Yamamoto, from Japan, for developing a method to extract vanilla fragrance and flavouring from cow dung.

Linguistics – A University of Barcelona team for showing that rats are unable to tell the difference between a person speaking Japanese backwards and somebody speaking Dutch backwards.

Literature – Glenda Browne of Blue Mountains, Australia, for her study of the word “the”, and how it can flummox those trying to put things into alphabetical order.

Peace – The US Air Force Wright Laboratory for instigating research and development on a chemical weapon that would provoke widespread homosexual behaviour among enemy troops.

Nutrition – Brian Wansink of Cornell University for investigating the limits of human appetite by feeding volunteers a self-refilling, “bottomless” bowl of soup.

Economics – Kuo Cheng Hsieh of Taiwan for patenting a device that can catch bank robbers by dropping a net over them.

Aviation – A National University of Quilmes, Argentina, team for discovering that impotency drugs can help hamsters to recover from jet lag.

Typos | Anne | New Template October 3, 2007

I read all the English newspapers on a daily basis and I simply despise typos…one would think that premier advertising agencies would hire ‘good’ copywriters…bah! humbug! Apologies to the wonderfully talented copywriters out there!

The body text in a recent advertisment I noticed, that was splashed across almost all English dailies reads “…very favourite fairytales…”

Now, who on earth says VERY favourite?!?!?!!!!!

Drama queen is probably flashing in your mind right now, but its true…one always notices the mistakes first…and quite rightly so…

Next point of discussion, ahem, ahem! I’m now the proud owner of the entire Anne series, the entire pack is MINE! This probably sounds potentially juvenile…but all avid ‘girl’ readers will tell you that the Anne series is just wonderful. It’s like meeting a kindred soul in print and its just completely huge leaps of wonderfully creative imagination and adventure…sigh!

There is a Sinhala drama based on Anne, completely disgusting I say! Blech!