This is especially true at TIFF, simply due to the size and scope of the event. On some days we have thousands of people passing through the public box office and once the festival opens we deal with an average of 20,000 plus attendees per day attending an average of seventy events at locations throughout the city.
When you are dealing in these volumes, there are going to be some people that have fully committed to perceiving their lives as nothing more than one giant inconvenience.
I encountered one such gentleman who insisted that I should stop taking care of a lady who had a slightly perplexing problem that required a phone call to resolve, and thus held the line up for a few extra minutes.
The basis of his logic was that I should drop what I was doing and take care of him, because what he needed was going to take less time. He then bellowed at me that he was illegally parked!
In the calmest voice I could muster, I told him that his nefarious parking habits were none of my concern, and that if he was in favour of a system whereby people were ranked as to the length of time that it would take to serve them, I would be glad to canvas the entire lineup so I could rank people thusly. Could you possibly wait an hour or two while I do that?
Next was a women whose type I have seen time and again. In my experience these are the people that I am most wary of. I call them the "ladder climbers". Inevitably, this demographic is in the 32 - 49 bracket and they have committed every essence of their being to carreering, and they have achieved some success. They have sport utes, a blind allegiance to whatever massive corporation they toil for, and a mortgage in Oakville or some such other car required locale, where the only minority in the area is the Pizza Pizza delivery guy.
Anyway, this particular woman opened with a possibly legitimate complaint that she had not been emailed. I apologize if there was a glitch, but you're here now so lets move forward, shall we? She then went on to explain that this made a big problem for her as she was holidaying in Greece and not getting her email results was a very huge problem. Again I tried to convince her that we should accept the past and make the best of the present. It was then that she made her first of four statements that she spends a lot of money at this festival.
By the fourth time that I heard how much she spent at this festival, I told her that attendance was not a requirement, and that I would be happy to refund her entire investment and cancel her account with TIFF. She then claimed that she didn't have time for this, as she had an important conference call.
I don't know about you, but to me the almost very last thing that would give me a sense of urgency when I am trying to help someone is their pleading that they have a confernce call scheduled. This is the filmfest version of "my dog ate my homework".
Anyway, it took all of ten minutes to fix this problem, but I had to endure one last eyeroll when I told her that she would have to step into another line, which was all of two minutes long. I then watched her tie up one of our cashiers for forty five minutes. Guess that conference call wasn't that urgent.
Yeah, I know, your life couldn't get any more difficult. But actually it could, and you will never get to that realization until you pull your head out of your self absorbed ass.
My third example of people who made my head explode is the guy who showed up complaining vehemently about the length of the lineup and how we were stupid and didn't know what we were doing, then failed to meet any of the clearly stated requirements for picking up tickets. I explained to him that part of the reason the lineups are long is that there are people like himself in them.
Having said all that, I must admit that most of the people who attend this divine madness are in fact patient, polite and generally awesome.
It seems to me that an unfortunate fact of life is that the human mind tends to gravitate towards remembering the negative experience over the positive one, in all contrast to the reality before us.
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