I’ve just had a lesson driven home to me about the perils of relying too much on secondary information sources on the Internet.
I have been intending for some time now to get around to seeing Hellboy II: The Golden Army, and as it is currently playing in the local second-run multiplex (its last stop before it jumps to DVD) I have decided to see it today before it is too late. So I checked Showtimes (nee Box Office, one of the apps whose temporary removal from the App Store was part of the short-lived furor over the "iPhone kill switch" and those dictatorial bastards at Apple) to get the time.
But I wasn’t sure how accurate the app’s information necessarily was. So I went to the Web site I usually check for local movie showtimes, a community portal called Springfield.net. And I immediately noticed something was wrong: Hellboy II was listed on Showtimes, but not present at all on that theater’s listing on Springfield.net!
For a tie-breaker, I googled the theater and checked out its homepage—and its list matched Showtimes’s, so it was the Springfield.net site that was incorrect.
The lesson I learned, and that we should all bear in mind in this age of portal sites that aggregate information from different sources, is that sometimes those portals can get it wrong. In this case it was Springfield.net (probably due to an ongoing site upgrade), but it could just as easily have been Showtimes. It does not hurt to audit the accuracy of your favorite portal every now and then—especially if you are planning to base an important decision (such as whether to drive 8 miles across town) on the information it provides.
