Ticket Printers

Dear Adam,

Dude, I can't stop perforating. I'm a ticket printer. I print tickets for a living. 50 years I've been printing tickets and perforating the stub. Ticket printers had to perforate it so when the ticket takers take the tickets, the stub tears off nice and clean before it takes up permanent residence in a wallet or a scrapbook or something. You leave the theater to go number one? You still got a nice evenly separated stub to show the one in every thousand ticket takers who actually check stubs on re-entry. Anyway, the point has been rendered moot by scanners. They scan the barcode on the ticket now. There's no such thing as a ticket taker. They're ticket printers now. Now us ticket printers got a reality to face. There's no ticket tearing. The perforating seems superfluous. What should we do?

With thanks,

Ticket Printer on the Perf

Dear Perf,

Listen to me, buddy. Listen to me good. You keep perforating that ticket. You have a story to tell. You have posterity to think about. Think about the children. Last week I took my son to a baseball game, and he held that perforated ticket in his hand. It never got ripped. The ticket scanner did not take a thing from us except the experience of what it used to mean to enter a ballpark. Without that perf, my son will never ask why those little almost-holes are lining up three-quarters of the way down the ducat. With the perf, he may one day ask why there is a line waiting to be ripped. And I will be ready to tell him that we used to live in a world where ticket takers took your ticket. They ripped it, and they ripped it good. We used to live in a world where ticketing agencies didn't charge you $2.00 to print a ticket on your home computer (what the blazes is up with that, anyway?). We used to live in a world where barcodes were something you put on groceries, not the pass that delivers you through the gates of Wrigley or into the hallowed halls of an R.E.M. concert.

Don't you dare stop perforatin', Perf. Tell your story. Don't ever stop!