AMusings

There has been a lot of talk recently concerning the mergers of LiveNation and Ticketmaster, and a lot more talk of the fact that ticketmaster redirected customers wanting to buy Bruce Springsteen tickets to their “sister” site ticketsnow. Certainly, you must know by now the word sister apparently loosely translates into “scalper” in some language I am clearly unaware of. The real enemy, as we sports ticket buyers know, is not scalper sites. I go through stubhub and ticketsnow almost as often as I go through ticketmaster. I don’t mind paying the extra money if it is a big game and I am sitting in an acceptable seat. No, the enemy is not the scalpers.

A lot of people think the enemy in these “ticket wars” are the organizations themselves saving too many tickets for employees, or big whigs. I say it’s your organization. Keep the tickets if you want. You’re the one losing the money, not me. So in my world the organizations are not the enemies either.

You know who is?

Think real hard.

I’ll give you a hint: “Your page will refresh in 15 seconds. At that time we will determine your place in line.”

If you guessed the God-forsaken virtual waiting room, you were right.

Now if you have never been in the virtual waiting room, I congratulate you. And if you have been privy to the online equivalent to the now-defunct Catholic purgatory, then I feel for you, and understand your suffering.

For those of you unfamiliar with the VWR (online lingo for the most miserable place this side of Brigitte Neilson’s forbidden passage way), let me explain it to you. You sign onto your team’s website at 10am when tickets are supposed to go on sale. They take you to the team’s 2009 schedule. You then select the game you would like to attend. You think everything is going smoothly until the screen welcomes you to the virtual waiting room.

This is not your typical Doctor’s office waiting room. You can not read a “Golf Digest” from 2003. You can not discover ten things different in each picture on the back page of “Highlights For Children”. You can not sit next to a fellow patient, who is hell bent on telling you about how her son is the best 9 year old cello player at John F. Kennedy middle school. All you can do is wait.

Now waiting in itself is not a bad thing. Sometimes waiting is a good thing. You have to wait an hour in between eating and swimming, you have to wait to drive for 2 hours after having your eyes dilated, and you have to wait 8 minutes for a Lean Cuisine to become so hot in your microwave that you’re pretty sure “Backdraft” was based on your vegetable lasagna. Everyone has waited. But you see, here in the virtual waiting room, you don’t just wait. They refresh your page every 15 seconds as if you have a fighting chance of getting a ticket (which you don’t unless of course you want to go to a Wednesday afternoon Royals-Blue Jays game).

So here you are counting down from 15 to 1, waiting, hoping and praying that maybe it is your turn. The counter hits one, the page begins to refresh….

Your mind becomes an amalgamation of thoughts and feelings: “Maybe this is it! Maybe I can go to opening day.” “If I get in now, I can have a chance to look for other tickets.” “I will be the hit of my workplace if I can get these tickets!” “The quicker I’m done with this, the faster I can get back to pretending to work!”

And then page refreshes, and you are back in the virtual waiting room.

Now, this doesn’t happen like twice and then you are in. Oh no. This goes on for hours and hours and hours. If it refreshes four times every minute, and you are in there for one hour (which is not long at all), you have gone through the fake excitement of page refreshing 240 times. 240 times.

Now it’s try 241! And guess what?? You got in! You are the chosen one! Great news, except of course, all the games you wanted are sold out, and if you are lucky you might be able to attend your Wednesday doozie in which a team from a bad city in a bad state, take on a bad team from a boring country. (And by the way, your tickets probably won’t be very good.)

So what do we do about this CTB? How do you propose we fix this problem?

Well my children, I will tell you. I propose standardized testing. Let’s say you are a Yankees fan. Instead of signing up for a raffle, or bracelets, or the luck of the draw in the virtual waiting room, you have to sign up to take a test on the history of the New York Yankees. Then, the day tickets go on sale, only those who passed have the opportunity to buy tickets.

But CTB! What if people sell that opportunity to scalpers?

Well friends, that too will be taken care of, as there will be a pre-game quiz. If you can’t accurately describe to me a double switch or a suicide squeeze then you will be watching the game next to Deborah, the drunken cougar at the bar across the street.

If you don’t like this idea, there might be something wrong with your thought process. If the ticket gurus have outsmarted me, then so be it. But when they can’t tell me who allowed a ball to go through his legs in 1984 and ruined the Cubs chances of beating San Diego, then they can tell Deborah I said hello.