Theatre WTF
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I would be interested to know what exactly happened here.
Me, my wife and my parents-in-law went to watch a show at a theatre last Sunday (4 people). Just before the show began 4 other people came to us and asked if we were sitting in the correct place, as their tickets showed exactly the same seats as ours.We said yes, and they called the theatre manager to help resolve the situation. Note that all tickets are booked online. I wasn't involved in the resolution of it all, but some point during the process they asked my father-in-law for both his name and surname. I actually overheard the manager say "weird, they both have exactly the same name and surname".
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@Vault_Dweller said in Theatre WTF:
I would be interested to know what exactly happened here.
I think I know what happened. Here, let me give you all the information I have:
@Vault_Dweller said in Theatre WTF:
Me, my wife and my parents-in-law went to watch a show at a theatre last Sunday (4 people). Just before the show began 4 other people came to us and asked if we were sitting in the correct place, as their tickets showed exactly the same seats as ours.We said yes, and they called the theatre manager to help resolve the situation. Note that all tickets are booked online. I wasn't involved in the resolution of it all, but some point during the process they asked my father-in-law for both his name and surname. I actually overheard the manager say "weird, they both have exactly the same name and surname".
Filed Under: This is all the information I have. I hope it helps!
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@Kuro
I have been trying to make sense of this but one thing strikes me: they both have exactly the same name and surname
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@Luhmann
Although surprising, the only conclusion that we can draw is that they both have exactly the same name and surname.
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@cvi said in Theatre WTF:
the only conclusion that we can draw is that they both have exactly the same name and surname
I don't know ... maybe one is called Hendrik Victor and the other one Victor Hendrik.
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@Luhmann :c-c-c-combo breaker:
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@Luhmann said in Theatre WTF:
@cvi said in Theatre WTF:
the only conclusion that we can draw is that they both have exactly the same name and surname
I don't know ... maybe one is called Hendrik Victor and the other one Victor Hendrik.
Rowan Atkinson - Interview with Elton John – 05:47
— SlugBalancer
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@thegoryone Both had online printouts of their tickets. The reference numbers were different, but the seat numbers were the same.
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Name used as a primary key?
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@Jaloopa Or something similar I think
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Natural vs. surrogate keys rant in 3... 2... 1...
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- Two groups of people bought tickets for the same show, and happened to have the same name and surname. The database uses name and surname as primary key. Failure ensued.
- Two groups of people bought tickets for the same show at the same time. They hit a concurrency bug that registered both in the same entry, and one of them got the data of the other.
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Before the last line I would have said, they had tickets for the next night, and screwed it up. That happens a lot. But this...
shrug
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@Yamikuronue said in Theatre WTF:
they had tickets for the next night
That was my first thought as well initially. But alas...
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@anonymous234 said in Theatre WTF:
Two groups of people bought tickets for the same show at the same time. They hit a concurrency bug that registered both in the same entry, and one of them got the data of the other.
They both booked correctly, but someone in the booking office noticed that the “same person” appeared to have booked twice and “helpfully” cancelled one of the bookings.
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All this talk of names reminds me of https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
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@RaceProUK said in Theatre WTF:
All this talk of names reminds me of https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
In particular
- People’s names are globally unique.
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@RaceProUK said in Theatre WTF:
All this talk of names reminds me of https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/
I believe the customer will have to make do with an unicode string, because the boss will kill me if I tell him I need to support images.
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@Vault_Dweller said in Theatre WTF:
I would be interested to know what exactly happened here.
Me, my wife and my parents-in-law went to watch a show at a theatre last Sunday (4 people). Just before the show began 4 other people came to us and asked if we were sitting in the correct place, as their tickets showed exactly the same seats as ours.We said yes, and they called the theatre manager to help resolve the situation. Note that all tickets are booked online. I wasn't involved in the resolution of it all, but some point during the process they asked my father-in-law for both his name and surname. I actually overheard the manager say "weird, they both have exactly the same name and surname".
Did both of you print your tickets online, or collect them from the will call window? They probably booked two blocks of 4 tickets, but reserved them by name, and when you or the will call clerk printed out the tickets it printed the same block of 4 tickets both times because all it was going by was the name they were registered under. It either couldn't show or the clerk didn't notice that there were 2 blocks of tickets registered under that name.
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@PleegWat but how would Prince have registered?
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Obviously the other person was your father from an alternate timeline.
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@anotherusername We both printed our tickets online, no clerks involved. But the error you mention could just as well have been made by the system instead of a clerk.
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@Vault_Dweller said in Theatre WTF:
We both printed our tickets online, no clerks involved.
It has the smell of having had someone take manual action, probably to try to stop people from being charged twice.
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@Vault_Dweller said in Theatre WTF:
@anotherusername We both printed our tickets online, no clerks involved. But the error you mention could just as well have been made by the system instead of a clerk.
Yeah, I was trying to imply that. It didn't really matter whether there was a human involved or just an automated system; either one could make that mistake.