Skyfail

Last night, The Wife and I went to our local Odeon cinema in Chatham to watch the new Bond movie Skyfall. And as nothing seems to go right at the moment, there were problems along the way.

First of all we had issues trying to book the seats online. Pages on the website kept failing to load and when we did eventually get the seats we wanted, when we tried to pay it kept hanging and failing to process the payment. Eventually on the 4th go we managed to get the seats booked. Although we didn’t realise for about 15 minutes and had actually given up trying to book them. It was only when The Wife went back to the computer to do something that she noticed that we’d got them.

When we arrived at the cinema, The Wife went to pick the tickets up while I queued up for some snacks. Not content with having hardly any staff serving customers, it appeared as though these staff members were on some kind of “Annoy Customers By Working Really Slowly” initiative because it took ages to be served. As a result we were late going into the screening. Not by much, just about 8 minutes.

On a normal day this would be OK because when you go to the cinema these days you’ll have about 10 minutes of adverts followed by about three to five 2-minute trailers. So generally a film would start about 15-20 minutes after it’s advertised start time.

However when we walked in, the film had already started! We’d missed the beginning! We stumbled across the aisle to our seats becoming, in the process, those annoying people that turn up late that everyone hates and sat down trying not to disturb everyone else as we took off coats turned phones off and got settled.

After all of this, the film turned out to be really good and we both enjoyed it. It was a good enough film in it’s own right and not just a good Bond film. It’s just a shame that the whole process of getting there to enjoy it was totally ruined!