We go eat lunch, have a lovely time, and go over to the theater. It's the matinee and we pull out our tickets, get sent upstairs. I hand my ticket to the usher, who says "up the stairs and to your left" and then my mom shows hers, more out of habit than necessity. "up the stairs and to your right". so my mom and I are confused, and we look at the tickets. It seems that the girl at the TKTS booth has given us seats 5 and 6, in the same row. Now maybe this isn't clear to some of the readers, so I will elaborate. Seats 5 and 6 are on COMPLETE opposite sides of the theater. Nearly as far as you can get from each other in the same row. Needless to say, my mother and I were annoyed.
We asked the house manager if there was anything they could do, and in a spectacular display of GOOD service(for this problem was really not his fault or his to fix!) he let us sit in the last row of the orchestra in some free seats, noting our old seat numbers so he could move people there if necessary. It was a small theater and the seats were rather good.
furthermore, by some good fortune of ours, at intermission an elderly man and his wife asked if anyone was sitting with us, because they wanted to sit back there. he explained that his wife had trouble walking up the stairs from her seat, and didn't want to have to do it again. Where were his seats? Row N. And did we want to sit there? So of course, we gave up our seats to the nice couple and ended up in their lovely seats about 20 rows forward.
The theatre was wonderful about it, but really I think that a vital part of training to sell theatre tickets is the knowledge of the seating chart. Considering that every theatre I've been to is set up the same way, it's a valuable thing to learn.
