Idiots on Steroids!

After the last presidential election over here, I thought I knew who the most stupid person in the world was, or alternately, the most stupid people.
Three days ago, I was proved wrong! I travel a lot (only between Mashhad and Tehran) and some of these trips are by bus. The bus tickets are sold online as well as in traditional ways. Let me add here that the online bus ticket selling system is brain-dead, but not quite as much as the train and airplane systems!
Anyways, as you might guess, I buy almost all of my tickets online, and this last time was no exception. Only this time I bought them from a bus company that I had not heard about before.
The online system works like this: you go to http://ssit.ir/ and sign in (WARNING: Internet Exploiter-only website!) and choose your city of origin, the bus company, the destination, date, bus, seat, etc. and make the purchase. It gives you a 12-digit reservation number that you present in the bus terminal along with your name, and they print out a ticket for you if the information checks out. It takes about 2 minutes online and 2 minutes at the terminal, and you don't even have to show an ID or something.
When I went to the terminal in Mashhad about 15 minutes before the departure time, I foresaw no problems. How wrong was I! I went to the counter for my bus line and asked them to give me the print of a ticket I had bought online. The guy said "OK, no problem. Give me your ticket." I thought he had misunderstood me for some reason. "No, I bought my ticket on the Internet. I want the hard copy now." (I didn't say anything about the concept of "hard copy" to him of course. He would have died of brain hemorrhaging right then!) He said "OK, but you have to give me your ticket first." I said that I don't know what he's talking about and he went on to produce a single grease-covered piece of yellow paper that was a printed snapshot of the web-page that contained the reservation number! I was astounded, but I kinda expected this (maybe I'll tell you later about the time I got on a plane without showing a ticket!) So I began explaining that that piece of paper was completely worthless and anybody could write that up in a matter of minutes. And that I have traveled by online-reserved bus more than a dozen times and all I had to provide to get my ticket was the 12-digit number. He went on and said the most stupid thing he could have said. He said: "But how could we get our money from the company that handles the online sales?" !!!
I did not laugh. I could barely contain my anger as it was. I told them to check their passenger records and see that a ticket with the same number that I was giving them and my name was in there. They called in one of their colleagues and after much conferring and discussion among themselves, they managed to view the list of the passengers for my bus, and guess what, my name was indeed in there. But this did not change anything at all. The morons still insisted that I needed to give them my "ticket"! I even suggested that they print two copies of the ticket they were supposed to give me, but no; they couldn't do that, because "their computer did not print the tickets," (which I guess means their "program" didn't print tickets) which is BS, because I know that their software is the same for all bus corporations. They couldn't even find the Farsi version of the "Print..." button (maybe the problem was the three dots? After all, three is too many!)
In the end, I went out of the terminal, found an Internet Café and printed the online confirmation page (with the buttons and menus and everything!) and brought it back to them. They took it with such looks of triumph that someone from outside might have thought they had taught me a valuable lesson on the mechanics of the universe. They wrote out a piece of paper for me, and finally I went on to the bus, half and hour late. My seat was changed and the bus still waited for another 15 minutes before finally getting on the way.
Now you understand why these people win the honor of the most stupid people in the world.