Meltdown at the Movies

A few Fridays ago I decided to take my Cinemark coupon for a 1600 peso movie and treat myself to a little matinee. My summer teaching schedule is really light and I knew the following weeks were going to be a whirlwind with having all of my family visitors here. I've seen "Meet the Fockers" playing over and over again on TV recently so I chose "Little Fockers."
After living in a place that's sunny every day, it's really easy for me to say that I have no desire to go back and live in the Chicago climate again, that is until I saw the opening scene of the movie with the Chicago skyline and Lake Michigan and then suddenly it becomes the best city in the world to me all over again.
Anyway, despite the title of this post, I didn't have a meltdown over missing Chicago or anything like that...
When I arrived I knew something was amiss since there were no movie titles or times listed up on the board and the only thing visible was the Windows Home Edition screen saver floating and bouncing around. It was the middle of the day and there was only a handful of people waiting, and waiting patiently they were not. There seemed to be 3 teenage girls running the show, and after about 15 minutes the natives were incredibly restless, demanding managers and wanting the problem solved immediately. It was obviously a problem with the computer system, and without it they were unable to sell tickets at that exact moment, and were waiting for a supervisor to come help them implement the old-school paper ticket process.
As this scene unfolded around me, I started to think about how people at home would have reacted under the same circumstances, and decided that they would have behaved even worse. The funniest part was even in all of my "gringa-ness", the women standing around me in line just kept talking to me, imploring me to to participate and chime in about how ridiculous it was, how could they not have a supervisor there, how are the movies going to start on time, why don't they have a backup system for emergencies such as this, blah blah blah.
My favorite part was when the women in front of me pointed to her watch to tell me "she said the supervisor would be here in 5 minutes, and it's been 6..."
When the supervisor finally arrived, he came out and explained that they would be using a paper tickets and that we should form 2 lines depending on what movie we wanted to see, and that's when all hell broke lose. People were yelling and getting out of line to approach the ticket counter and I just stood there with a stupid smile on my face laughing to myself at how upset everyone was over this.
I calmly walked up to the window, bought my cheap ticket to Little Fockers, and made my way to the kettle corn line. In the end, the movie started 30 minutes later than it was supposed to, not enough to even come close to ruining my day.