Gallery Night

Success is in the eyes of the beholder. Ashby and Allison Fine Arts Galleries opened in June 2003. Their first gallery night in Alpine, Texas needed a method of counting visitors for future planning.

The solution, a battery operated electric eye to count the number of visitors who passed through the portal of the gallery. The device was installed at a height of the average waist of a person. Several tests were conducted to determine if the count being recorded was correct. Everything worked to a tee. A simple division by two would account for one customer coming and going. On Friday at 10 am the device was reset to zero. A piece of masking tape was put over the numbers. We decided not to check it until Sunday morning, after the activities of the weekend.

As the weekend progressed we were glad the device was taking care of the counting, business was hopping. We could hear the click as people came and went. Saturday we closed at midnight and headed home exhausted.

The next morning we drove to the gallery. Our first order of business was detaching the tape on the counter. On checking we were surprised, 8,371 visitors passed through our door, we knew this was not possible. The division by 2 meant 4,185 ½ people had been there. We were disappointed; the count could not be accurate, as it was high. We expected between three and five hundred visitors.

We moved to the porch to guesstimate the number of visitors. Stepping through the door we heard the faint click of the counter. As we were drinking our coffee we heard the faint clicking sound again. We looked at the door and both laughed. There was Picatso, our gallery cat, pawing the electric eye. Click, click, click, the mystery was solved.