Like yelling "Fire" in a crowded theater

Today has been one of those interesting days.

Our furnace wasn't working earlier, which explains why I was so blasted cold all morning. We had a guy come out and fix that, so it's working fine now.

It's kind of a gross day, so the family decided to take my dad to see Harry Potter this afternoon. We drove over to the theater, got our popcorn, and were getting settled with about 30 minutes to go until the start of the movie.... and the fire alarm went off. These brilliant white lights started flashing around our very dark theater and a robotic voice told us to make our way to the nearest exit. So, the entire contents of an 18-Screen theater gathered outside in the cold and slush, many people wishing they had remembered their coats (*cough*Andrew.)

The employees were very nice, and gave 2 free passes to everyone waiting outside, even the people who hadn't even been at the movies to begin with. ("Free passes? Sure I was at...uh...that new movie...yeah.") After 20 minutes or so the all clear was given and everyone piled back inside, expecting everything to pick back up where it left off. We got refills on our very cold popcorn and had just gotten resettled when we found out that all movies were cancelled until this evening.

Everyone files back outside. Moaning and complaining. (Well, not us. We were cracking up.) My mother went to the ticket counter to switch our tickets to a later showing and, rather than just switch them over, they refunded our original tickets AND gave us 6 more free tickets for one of the evening showings. So, all together we scored 18 free movie tickets....24 if you count the 6 for the cancelled showing.

Sometimes being inconvenienced is a wonderful thing.

I feel sorry for the employees of the theater. They lost a lot of time and money today because someone pulled a stupid prank. I think they performed very well, considering the circumstances and managed to keep the very cold and impatient crowd relatively calm. Besides that, a bunch of them had to run around outside in their short-sleeved uniforms! Brrrrrr....