The Ticket Docket

The plaintiff obtained a code, sat in a queue for fifty-one minutes, and secured four tickets at face value. She is one of six people in a chat where the tour had been discussed, in general terms, for months.

The court finds the following facts undisputed. She paid for all four immediately, roughly $340. She then offered them in the chat. Three people replied within the hour and were allocated. Two replied the following morning and were not.

The two who replied late have advanced two arguments. The first is that they were asleep, which is true and which the court notes is a complete defense to nothing. The second is that the group had discussed going “together,” and that a general expression of collective enthusiasm months earlier created an obligation to hold seats.

It did not. A conversation about wanting to do a thing is not a reservation. The court has some sympathy — being left out of a plan you helped imagine is a genuine hurt, and dressing it up as a procedural complaint is what people do when the real complaint sounds childish out loud.

But the plaintiff sat in a queue for fifty-one minutes and spent $340 of her own money on other people's behalf before anyone had promised her a cent, and the proposed remedy — that she should have held two of four seats indefinitely against the possibility of a reply — would make her worse off for having been generous.

Verdict for the plaintiff. The court directs the three allocated parties to pay her before the show and not on the night, because “I'll get you at the venue” is how a friendship acquires a $170 asterisk.

To the two who were asleep: say you are disappointed. Just that sentence, with nothing attached to it. It is available, it is true, and it works.

The stream ran for two hours to an audience of about ninety. Four of the eleven people present did not know it was live. One found out the following morning from a colleague.

The defense is that it was “just the music” and that the camera faced the speakers. Submitted footage shows the room, repeatedly, including a conversation about a third party's divorce.

The court will keep this short because the principle is not complicated: a room is not a set, and the fact that a camera is small and a broadcast is casual has no bearing on whether the people inside the frame agreed to be inside it. The consent required is not legal, it is social, and it costs one sentence at the start of the evening.

Verdict: guilty. Remedy: the recording comes down, and he tells the four himself rather than posting an apology to ninety people who were not wronged.

The driver has the aux. The driver has always had the aux. Distance driven, ownership of vehicle and quality of taste are all irrelevant, and the court declines to hear argument on any of them.

One narrow exception: on a drive over three hours the front passenger may hold it for the middle third, because the driver's judgment degrades and everybody has heard the playlist.