2010-12-06

Lazy!

I just ordered tickets through the web service of the Royal Dramatic Theatre and the mail receipt contains this mess:
Retrieve your booked tickets from the ticket office within ten calendar days, thereafter they will be automatically unbooked.

If your order is for a performance closer in time than nine days from the receipt of this message, the tickets must be retrieved at the latest three days before the performance.

You can also pay your tickets to our postal giro account and have the tickets sent to your home. Give your order number as reference. Note that it normally takes three working days for your payment to reach us.

[…]

Paid tickets are sent to the address you have given, if it is more than six days to the performance. If it is five days or less to the performance, they are in our ticket office.

Now, the web app already knows when I made my booking; on what day the performance is; and that I already paid for the tickets. So some web programmer couldn’t be arsed to write four lines of code to tell me directly that I have to get my tickets in the ticket office, since I booked the tickets on such short notice. Instead I have to work out the difference between calendar days, working days, and unspecified days, and possibly also get confused by whether Wednesday is two or three days before Friday if the performance is in the evening and if that is different if Thursday is a holiday even though they give performances then. That “postal giro” hasn’t been called that for five years just fits in with the rest of it.

A sternly worded letter has been sent.

2 comments:

Martin said...

Send your sternly worded letters to the ticket office within ten calendar days, thereafter they will be automatically bounced.

If your stern letter concerns a performance closer in time than nine days from the receipt of this message, the letter must be sent at the latest three days before the performance.

You can also send your sternly worded letter to our postal giro account and have our meek reply sent to your home. Give your zip code as reference. Note that it normally takes three working days for your letter to reach us.

Our meek replies are sent to the address you have given, if it is more than six days to the performance. If it is five days or less to the performance, you must collect them in our ticket office.

kai said...

To complete the confusion, the tickets arrived in the mail yesterday, thus seemingly contradicting the requirement to pick them up at the ticket office.