Keough’s Corner #3: Ticketmaster? More like Ticket-not-yet.

Good evening my very good friends. Before I even start my rant I want to take a second and thank everyone who has read my first two columns. Usually the only ones who get to hear my admittedly very funny and clever complaining are my wife, who doesn’t seem to appreciate the gold I’m spinning, and my son, who constantly interrupts me when I’m on a roll to sing him “The Wheels on the Bus” again. (Side note: I could write a whole column about that song. The mommies say “shhhh shhhh shhhh” and the daddies say “I love you, I love you?” What kind of patriarchal nonsense is that? If anything, it's the mommies saying “I love you” and the daddies saying “Walk it off, you’re fine, that wasn’t even that bad of a fall.” I guess that’s harder to rhyme.)

“The Graysons on the bus say ‘I’m the cutest child who’s ever lived.’”

I’m getting off topic and I haven’t even told you what the topic is yet. Let’s say the new musical icon that all of you young people love is coming to town. I imagine they have a name like Lil Housephone, or Lil Boogie Face Tat, or Lil Toenail, or Lilwaterbed (FYI: I only made up one of those). What do you do if you want to see them live? You log onto Ticketmaster and prepare for pure, unadulterated misery. There is a pantheon of companies in this world so reviled for their interactions with their customers, so hated for how badly they do the one service they claim to provide, that they exist in a hall of fame of consumer grief. Entities like UPS, United Airlines, and Comcast Cable (before they rebranded to Xfinity) are known for the utter disdain they hold for their customers, but I don’t think any of them can hold a candle to Ticketmaster. Ticketmaster makes a sport out of annoying you and then getting you to pay “convenience fees” for the least convenient experience of your life.

Let's start with just trying to buy tickets. This seems like it should be the one thing a company claiming to have achieved mastery in tickets should be able to get right, but good luck. You log onto the system right when tickets go on sale and you are whisked away into this magic line that forms. No one knows how it works or how they determine the order of the line, or why the line never moves. I’m assuming they take each user name, write it on a ping pong ball, and one old man in a large empty room with dim lighting, a checkerboard floor, and the buzz of some nondescript machine pulls one name at a time from an old school bingo drum. Hours pass like this and if you’re lucky you can finally buy tickets. If you aren't, the whole website crashes because it was apparently designed by a middle school student. If a big concert is coming, you may waste your entire day in line and not even get a ticket. Remember when Taylor Swift tickets went on sale? I don’t think a single senior got anything done all day—which describes most days here, but I digress.

Imagine by some miracle, you get to the front of the line. The tickets cost 100 dollars. You select two of them and go to checkout when you notice you were charged 300 dollars. Now I know I teach chemistry, not calculus (though 2gether did teach me that the core of calculus is U+ME=US), but last I checked 100 + 100 = 200. So you look and see a service fee, processing fee, and delivery fee. WHAT!??!?! First of all, the only service you are providing is processing and delivering a ticket to me, how do you get to charge me for that three times? That’s like me charging the DOE a teaching fee, an instructor fee, and a “making fun of students” fee. It's all the same thing. You begrudgingly pay the fees because there is no other way to get tickets to an event other than through this cartoon villain of a company.

I hope you never have any issues with your tickets, because if you do, Ticketmaster is about as helpful as traffic lights in a bike lane: completely useless. I started a chat, which is advertised as “a quick way to get your questions answered.” I was told the wait time for a customer service rep was no more than four hours. That's crazy, but I waited and a customer service rep did finally log on to help me THREE DAYS LATER!!! I was on hold for three days! And once this representative did get back to me, she copied and pasted something from the FAQ page that didn’t even pertain to my question. It’s been eight days since then as of the writing of this article and I am no closer to any resolution.

I have to admit, I didn’t want to write my article about Ticketmaster because I think it is a genuine problem and somebody should do something about it. But, I also think that it's such an over-the-top putrid company that it deserves to be brought down some pegs in a column for a school e-zine that no one associated with the company will read. So is there anything we can actually do about this? Unfortunately, no—the only seats left for a better ticket-buying experience have been scooped up by scalpers and bots. I am, however, selling tickets on Keoughmaster for Keough’s Corner live. You are number [error] in queue, your wait time is {456 years}, you are a valued customer please don’t log out…. error error errrrroorrrrrr. 01010100 01101001 01100011 01101011 01100101 01110100 01101101 01100001 01110011 01110100 01100101 01110010 00100000 01010011 01110101 01100011 01101011 01110011

See you next time.