What's in a Ticket?
By Finn Baldwin
Tickets are, in many ways, the backbone of civilised society. If that sounds like hyperbole that’s because it mostly is, and yet. There’s a great legacy of ticket collecting in my family. Mostly when people say stuff like that they’re referring to something cool like an ancient skill or a really good recipe. No, my great legacy is at least four generations of people who really like little slips of paper.
These days of course a ticket is much more than a little slip of paper, and by that I mean that now some tickets are made of card and they all have QR codes on them. Actually this QR code thing was so good that they did away with the slips of paper all together. The slip of paper doesn’t mean anything anymore, which means the cinema attendants that are ripping my tickets nearly in half rather than just scanning them are probably only doing it because they hate me personally.
I don’t blame them for this of course. It’s actually kind of ridiculous that I still insist on having a printed ticket every time I go and watch a movie. At best this process requires me fiddling around with a machine in the corner of the room that I try to shove one of the aforementioned QR codes at for an embarrassing amount of time before giving up and just typing in the order number. At worst it means I have to go up to another human being and say ‘can you print this out for me?’ to which they usually say ‘you know you can just scan the QR code?’. They don’t, actually, but I can tell that it’s what they’re thinking. Anyway they print out the ticket and then I walk about two meters away so that their coworker can rip up the ticket they just handed to me. Foiled again.
I have a big wall in my flat when I have about a decade's worth of cinema tickets. Half of them have become illegible due to sun damage and the other half are being held together with tape. Look, the truth is that I could just scan the QR code, it’s quick and easy and no one gets hurt. But there’s not as much fun in that. As much as I like going up to a stranger and quietly shoving my phone in their face until they scan the QR code on it with a satisfying little beep, it’s not quite as good as handing someone a real, actual, thing.
no souvenirs could possibly compete with that weird little ticket, which, as a bonus, was technically free
I’m worried I’ve given you a false impression of the ticket game by only talking about movies. Tickets are actually used for many things, not just movies. A couple of years ago a friend and I went on that old ferris wheel in Vienna. The ticket for this ferris wheel is truly a spectacle to behold. It’s a little white rectangle with two notches inexplicably taken out of the long side of the card. Printed just slightly off-centre in the middle is a smaller, more cartoony kind of ticket. You know, like an arcade ticket, with the perforated edges and the slightly off-blue colouring. Printed on the inside of this smaller ticket is the date that the ferris wheel was made, printed in such a way that it looks like the date of issue. Every day I look at this ticket and find myself delighted by its bizarre nature and off-putting appearance. They sell souvenirs at the ferris wheel but frankly no souvenirs could possibly compete with that weird little ticket, which, as a bonus, was technically free.
There’s another, even more secret and exclusive world to tickets, one which many of you will probably never get to experience. I tell you about it not to brag but to demonstrate to you the true power of a ticket. I have a side-gig as a local theatre reviewer, and by far the best part of this is that every now and then I get to walk up to a desk and say ‘I’m here to collect press tickets’. Nothing feels cooler than this. Actually one thing feels cooler than that, and it’s right after when someone shakes your hand and gives you a little piece of card with your name on it and a little ‘(PRESS)’ marker below. People spend their whole lives chasing the kind of high that they could be getting from being given exclusive press tickets to local theatre events.
This is the first step in reaching the best feeling in the world, which is having a ten year old ticket from a movie that you don’t even remember seeing.
I’m sure many of you are reading this with intense jealousy. You’re probably thinking that my life seems so whimsical and fun that you can hardly stand it. To that I have to say: you too could be living this life. Maybe you get your first ticket and you think to yourself ‘this doesn’t feel that good’. That’s the devil talking. You can defeat him by getting a couple more tickets and realising that, actually, it feels awesome. This is the first step in reaching the best feeling in the world, which is having a ten year old ticket from a movie that you don’t even remember seeing. What a rush, I can only imagine this is what Nirvana is like.
With a ticket collection you can say goodbye to forgetting when you went to things, goodbye to forgetting the name of that play you saw, goodbye to getting expensive souvenirs so that you don’t forget a ferris wheel you went on once. All of that is right there with you, it’s in your ticket. Also your heart, but your heart doesn’t have a fun little QR code now does it?
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