The $27 movie ticket

Cee and I went to the ShowPlace ICON tonight to watch Wes Craven’s new flick, My Soul To Take.

The ShowPlace ICON is Minneapolis’ nicest theater, but one of the creepiest things about the theater is that the automated ticket machine has a British accent. It’s ridiculous.

We get to the theater and find a pack of teenage girls occupying both of the expat teller machines. We wait, and the girls eventually finish and skip into the main part of the theater.

I walk up to the British auto-teller. Cee is at the machine next to mine.

I select my movie, then theater, and I quickly check Cee’s machine to see if our reserved seats are next to each other. As I do this, some of the teenage girls come back. The blonde says to the redhead: “No YOU check if we left our tickets in the machine!”
Blondie does a half crouch behind me, says “nothing!” and they run back towards the usher.
Cee and I finish buying the tickets and walk up to the main usher. The usher takes Cee’s ticket and gives him 3-D glasses. I hate dealing with all the paperwork that the machine spits out, so I shove my pile of receipts at the usher. He sorts through them and says,

Usher: “Uh, you’re not in the same theater.”
Me: “What?”
Usher: “You’re not in the same theater. You bought VIP tickets to another movie.”

Woops.

I then get a manager and explain that I’m an idiot. He swipes my credit card to start the refund process, but then gets confused:

Manager: “So you guys don’t want to see Red?”
Me: “No, we want to see My Soul To Take.”
Manager: “Well let me get his ticket too.”
Me: “Oh, no, he paid separately.”
Manager: “But you bought to two VIP tickets to Red.”
Me: “…uh what?”

Now I’m annoyed. I might be ditzy enough to selection the wrong movie on the machine. I can believe that. But I did not buy two $15 tickets by mistake. That is not possible.

I then realize that the girls behind me must have left their tickets in the machine. I try to explain this to the manager. He doesn’t want to be bothered – “Well, you may have just made some money then.”

He refunds my card $30, and then charges me $13.50 for the regular ticket that I probably bought in the first place.

I leave confused and whip out my blackberry to investigate.

After checking my bank account on the phone, I see that there’s no $30 refund, but instead two $13.50 charges five minutes apart, representing the original purchase and then my unnecessary “corrective” purchase at guest services.

I feel better that I did not accidentally buy two $15 tickets, but I think I may have ended up paying $27 to a single ticket. Woops.

Maybe the refunds just take more time to show up on the account?