The wart

Tickets buying and selling have known quite a revolution with the development of online reservations. Nowadays, not only can you order one ticket for a movie or a show directly from your bedroom, but you can (and sometimes have to) produce it yourself. What does it change, you may ask ? I print my tickets, no big deal. Just a good way to make a complicated process easier. That’s what progress is all about, isn’t it? No need for a ride to the store, no need to watch for the mailbox everyday hoping they didn’t get lost somewhere in the middle of the postal network.
But are we sure this is easier? Some people already warned that this kind of arrangements could be considered as a way to put customers at work and then to cut off some jobs. This is an important aspect of this ‘progress’. But there’s more. If you do not need to trust your postman anymore, you still have to trust your printer, hoping it won’t let you down and give you a nice homemade ticket in the right time. On the other side the organizers, whoever they might be, have to trust a lot of new devices that insure them that the mundane sheet of paper you give to them is a real ticket and not a copy. Well, of course, it is a copy, but you know what I mean. If some characters have been erased of the picture, new ones, mostly automated, appeared. However, the new network that allows you to align the moment you pay for a reservation and the moment you can actually enter the venue, is that fluid on theory only. Some links in the chain are fragile and when breakdowns do multiply (this is obviously the case here), you have to create a new device that is able to deal with the litigations occurring each time one of the automated readers is unable to recognize the barcode that have been inscribed on your paper by your printer.
If I would have some time, be sure that I would have spent it observing how this wart in the network actually manage to find a solution, probably with those stuffs that human people do: yelling, smiling, maybe crying. But Nick Cave was waiting for me inside, I wouldn’t miss him, would I?