Cinema Customer Scoop #1: Card-Swiping Lunacy

In my four and a half years of working at movie theaters it is inevitable that I will have my fair share of stupid customers and the inane gibberish that spouts from their noise holes. Each of them has their own personal stories, each with it’s own aggravating idiom. Now, you will be able to enjoy those wonderful stories of ignorance and all around nearly unbelievable acts of ineptitude.

This story comes from the month of June, in the year of two-thousand and ten. Obama was president, and the world was not yet overrun by pink zebras with deplorable table manners. I was working on concessions all day, the sun had gone down, so the glare from the cars in the parking lot was no longer frying my retinas. The box office worker had needed a break, and I being the only other person qualified to work it, left concessions and sauntered over to box.

I gave a rappa-tap on the door, and found it opened by Thomas, who was working within. He left and I sat down to a half hour of taking green paper, and exchanging it for glossy red papers. The first twenty-eight minuets went on without a hitch, few customers came, as I was assume everyone was out hog-calling, and hadn’t the thought to go and see a movie. I was almost done covering for Thomas, and a squat-bent up little man with a wife in a purple blouse came up to the window.

He ordered two tickets for Grown Ups, as if that wasn’t a big enough mistake, he proceeded to hand me his credit card, which became an extreme source of anger for me. I swiped the card through the machine, and the message popped up on my screen reading “This is not a Credit Card,” despite the fact that I looked very much like one, and it even said the words on it’s colorful surface. I shook off this first attempt at preventing the card from working, and went about swiping it again, as sometimes the register sometimes will refuse to scan on the first swipe. The message appeared several more times, so I shouted “Vile machine! Thou shoust not make me a fool!” and began entering the card’s information manually.

After entering the card number and expiration date, then asking the customer for his billing zip code, I turned the card around to find it’s three digit security code. What’s this!? The code was absent from its spot, not only had the ink from the letters disappeared, but the entire of the backside of the card had been sanded smooth. Unable to read the back of the card, I asked the squat man if he knew the code, quite obviously he didn’t. But, he did go on to tell me to keep trying and swipe the card fruitlessly. After five minutes of “this is not a credit card” I told him it did not work. He then produced a second card, which worked instantly.

Why hadn’t he given me the working card from the get go? Instead he let me go about frivolously trying to make the shell-shocked card work, despite it obviously being long dead. After leaving box, I saw him talking to Sean my manager about something. I scurried away into the hallway so that he wouldn’t see me, and attack me with his defunct card. Sean later told me that the small man said I had abused the card and given him a dirty look when I threw his tickets at him. Despite the fact that I give a neutral reaction to his card not working, he made me out to be a rather angry-elf who stabbed his card in the heart with a letter opener.