My plan this past weekend was to drop off TIFF advance orders for Sven, Mike, and myself on Sunday by getting to the box office before it closed at 7pm. Sakina and I left my place in Mississauga at about 6pm, since I figured an hour would be plenty of time for what is a 25 minute drive, especially on a Sunday evening.
Little did I know that the highway would be suffocated with the traffic of tweens and their guardians. Destination: Jonas brothers concert at the SkyDome!
The route was slow-going from Mississauga all the way to the Spadina exit and as we slowly made our way it was clear we weren’t going to get there on time. The deadline for dropping off orders was Monday at 1pm, so that wasn’t really a concern. It was mainly an annoyance knowing that I’d have to make the trip again the next morning, and juggle my work hours to do it early in the day. We arrived at Nathan Philip Square at about 7:15; I tried anyway to see if there were any volunteers hanging around who could simply take my order envelopes, but no such luck.
The next day I left work at 11:15am, made the trip all over again, and got to the box office at about noon. After a short wait in line, I hand over our envelopes and watched them go into box 49.
By the time I got back home and set up my laptop to work there for the afternoon, it was nearly 1pm and time for the lottery draw to determine the first box the festival would use to start filling orders from. As a sign of the changing times, instead of trying to find out the results by calling the box office, I simply waited for the news to spread on Twitter. Much to my surprise, it was box 48 that was selected!!
So basically it comes down to this: if I had managed to drop things off on Sunday evening as planned, we would have been in a box in the late 30s or early 40s — and our orders would be some of the last to be processed. But as it turned out, we were in the second box of orders and so we got tickets to ever first choice that we wanted.
All thanks to the Jonas brothers.
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