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Hello everyone, I'm mainly a lurker here, but I have a few tales from working at some Summer festivals in my area that I'd like to share.
The metalheads
This festival is quite close to where I live and I've worked there for a couple of years now. Mainly scanning in the tickets and giving people their wristbands. There are surprisingly little stories about this considering how many people I must have helped there. They may look intimidating, but metalheads are some of the nicest and friendly people you can meet, there were a couple of SC's over the years though.
Please print your tickets properly.
The festival mainly works with a ticket-service that sends them by mail, you just have to print them and we scan the barcode on it. A couple of rules for that to work though
- If it rains, you might want to make sure your ticket doesn't get wet, it's pretty hard to scan when the ink has run.
- Make sure there is ink in your printer. This may seem obvious to most, but not to one guest. His paper was white with the faintest gray where the text and barcode should have been. No we can't scan that. Bonus points for getting angry when we try to explain that he should go to the helpdesk where they could actually print him a new paper, he wanted his wristband there and then. Extra bonus points for getting even more angry when I didn't help him in perfect French, I know quite a bit, but it's pretty hard to understand when you're in rapid fire mode.
Yes, this system isn't perfect, please listen when we try to solve your problem
A group of about a dozen people comes trough, but for some reason one ticket doesn't scan. Normally that's a job for the helpdesk, but for some reason
they close a couple of hours before us, we hate that too. The only solution to the problem is to buy a new day-ticket, we write up what happened for you on a complaint form and the next day you go to the
helpdesk to get your combi-wristband. With the complaint form we gave you, you will get refunded for your day-ticket. (If the failure to scan was our fault and not due to a forgery of course)
I have to agree not to best of solutions, but it is one. Most of the times no one had a problem with this, but one of this group did (not even the person who couldn't get inside).
It took us about a quarter of an hour before we had finally managed to convince him it's the best we could do and his friend (who couldn't get in) finally managed to calm him down.
I can understand getting angry about this if you don't have to money to cover the day-ticket, but this was a group of a dozen people, it's 5euros a person, I bet you can manage to front that.
World's least sucky customer
To finish up, one even more remarkable customer, but this time because he didn't turn sucky. He had done something wrong while printing (printed confirmation instead of ticket) and we had to send him to the help-desk for that. The problem was that this guy was from somewhere in Eastern Europe and didn't speak any of the 5 languages we could help him in. After a while we thought we had managed to explain where he had to go and he took off. About an half hour later, he was back though, and he hadn't found the help-desk. Que a second attempt to explain him where he had to go, but with the same result. The third time he got to us he had called someone (we guess his wife) who did speak a little English and she was translating for us the best she could, so we finally got him to the helpdesk. It had taken more than 2 hours between his arrival and him finally being able to enter the festival, but he remained calm the whole time. When he left, he used the only English I had heard him speak the whole time, a horribly accented 'thank you'.
The metalheads
This festival is quite close to where I live and I've worked there for a couple of years now. Mainly scanning in the tickets and giving people their wristbands. There are surprisingly little stories about this considering how many people I must have helped there. They may look intimidating, but metalheads are some of the nicest and friendly people you can meet, there were a couple of SC's over the years though.
Please print your tickets properly.
The festival mainly works with a ticket-service that sends them by mail, you just have to print them and we scan the barcode on it. A couple of rules for that to work though
- If it rains, you might want to make sure your ticket doesn't get wet, it's pretty hard to scan when the ink has run.
- Make sure there is ink in your printer. This may seem obvious to most, but not to one guest. His paper was white with the faintest gray where the text and barcode should have been. No we can't scan that. Bonus points for getting angry when we try to explain that he should go to the helpdesk where they could actually print him a new paper, he wanted his wristband there and then. Extra bonus points for getting even more angry when I didn't help him in perfect French, I know quite a bit, but it's pretty hard to understand when you're in rapid fire mode.
Yes, this system isn't perfect, please listen when we try to solve your problem
A group of about a dozen people comes trough, but for some reason one ticket doesn't scan. Normally that's a job for the helpdesk, but for some reason
they close a couple of hours before us, we hate that too. The only solution to the problem is to buy a new day-ticket, we write up what happened for you on a complaint form and the next day you go to the
helpdesk to get your combi-wristband. With the complaint form we gave you, you will get refunded for your day-ticket. (If the failure to scan was our fault and not due to a forgery of course)
I have to agree not to best of solutions, but it is one. Most of the times no one had a problem with this, but one of this group did (not even the person who couldn't get inside).
It took us about a quarter of an hour before we had finally managed to convince him it's the best we could do and his friend (who couldn't get in) finally managed to calm him down.
I can understand getting angry about this if you don't have to money to cover the day-ticket, but this was a group of a dozen people, it's 5euros a person, I bet you can manage to front that.
World's least sucky customer
To finish up, one even more remarkable customer, but this time because he didn't turn sucky. He had done something wrong while printing (printed confirmation instead of ticket) and we had to send him to the help-desk for that. The problem was that this guy was from somewhere in Eastern Europe and didn't speak any of the 5 languages we could help him in. After a while we thought we had managed to explain where he had to go and he took off. About an half hour later, he was back though, and he hadn't found the help-desk. Que a second attempt to explain him where he had to go, but with the same result. The third time he got to us he had called someone (we guess his wife) who did speak a little English and she was translating for us the best she could, so we finally got him to the helpdesk. It had taken more than 2 hours between his arrival and him finally being able to enter the festival, but he remained calm the whole time. When he left, he used the only English I had heard him speak the whole time, a horribly accented 'thank you'.
to 
. Help yourself to cookies and booze, and if you need brain bleach just ask - everyone shares.
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