Back in the good old days of living in Lima, Peru, a guy had nothing to worry about. You could wander the streets dreaming to yourself blissfully in English without a care in the world. All the advertisements and billboards are in Spanish, and if you don’t know Spanish, they’re easy to tune out. Ditto with the political discussion, which has never been more worthy of ignoring than in the present day. On the rare occasion when you did begin to miss English, you could go watch a film. Back then buying a ticket involved walking up to the window and exchanging money for a single ticket good for any seat in the entire theater. That was before the dark times, before some idiot came along and decided to make Peru a nation of assigned movie seats.
The concept of assigned movie seats is a concept opposed to freedom. It’s authoritarian, it’s ruthless, and it makes the movies an unbearable experience. However, the idea is especially incompatible with Peru, where rules are already more of a suggestion than an actual guideline.
Generally when you see a movie in Peru, you can expect to have to move once or twice because somebody is going to: A. sit right behind you, and B. talk all through the film. Also, if you turn around and tell people to shut up at the cinema they get really annoyed. I’d pretty much gotten used to the expectation of arriving early at a film and sitting down, only to have somebody come and sit either right in front of me or right behind me (this is in an otherwise empty theater mind you). Back in the old days, the solution was simple, you’d just get up and move. But now, when you move you open yourself up to the potential of having some other person flip out when they find you in their seat, and because they’ll technically be in the right, you won’t be able to respond with righteous fury.
When you get your assigned movie seats in Peru, the teller turns a little TV screen to you so you can pick whatever seats you want. You’d think, armed with this technology, that people wouldn’t pick seats either right in front of you, or right behind (assuming the theater is empty) but they still do. It’s like people would rather huddle together in an awkward pairing of perfect strangers than spread out and enjoy themselves.
Another problem of picking your seats is that it takes extra time. Time is very much an illusion in Peru. If you are scheduled to meet somebody at 5PM, you should set your alarm clock for your afternoon nap to go off at about 5:10. Then you can get up, have a hair cut, take a shower, wash your clothing, wait for them to dry, have dinner, take another nap, start the whole process over again, and then head to the meeting point where you’ll probably still be waiting for a good two or three hours. The funny side of this is that everybody always wants you to meet on a busy street corner, and not something practical like an internet cafe where your time isn’t completely wasted if they show up late (yes, they still have internet cafes, they’re awesome–a good place to do your online banking). Also, if you say, “No, let’s meet at the internet cafe rather than the corner of Alfonso Ugarte and Espana because then when you’re late I’ll have something to do,” they get offended like they DON’T already plan to be late. It’s weird.
This impulse to tardiness spills over to the ticket line of course. So if you want to see a film at 7, and you’re in line at 6:45, you’re going to find yourself behind a bunch of individuals who are standing around in line chatting and laughing and carrying on, only to arrive at the cashier to say, “What’s good?” Seriously? You can’t pick the movie you want to see while you’re in line? This is especially infuriating because these people probably sprinted to get ahead of you when they saw that you, too, were headed to the movies.
“What’s good? Oh, who is in that? Ah, what time does it start? Can I pay in quotas?”
So, now in addition to this series of questions, you have to also endure, “Where do we want to sit?” And then you have to wait as all seventeen of them offer an opinion on what the best seats in the house will be. Your only means of retribution in this case is, if they’re going to the same show you want to see, to go ahead and pick either seats right in front of them or seats right behind.
However, I think I’ve figured out the solution to all these problems. The reality is, it’s fairly easy to print up a ticket that looks just like a real movie ticket. All you have to do is get some print shop management software and then copy off the movie ticket stub with all the seats in the theater listed. You still buy a ticket (I mean, let’s not get crazy now), but let’s face it, sometimes it’s hard to know what the best seat in the house is until you’ve actually set foot in the theater, so it’s good to have some freedom in hand.
So, there you have it, a perfect strategy for facing one of the most horrific inconveniences facing the human race in our modern times: assigned movie seats. But take heart, people are working around the clock to free us of this unbearable torment. If you still can’t bear the movies even with all these new and special tactics, there’s always Polvos Rosados…but that too has its own unique challenges to hurdle. Oh, and for those of you who like assigned movie seats, you’re wrong.
