Fun With TicketBastard

So this morning at 10 am, tickets for the Sox potential first round playoff games went on sale. I thought about taking the day off and lining up at the US Cellular, but that was not an option. So my only remaining course of action was to rely on my least favorite vendor in the world, TicketMaster Online.

Starting at about 9:50, I started clicking the link to the ticket purchase page over and over. I must have gotten about 100 windows telling me "Tickets go on sale on 9/12/03 at 10 am". Finally, at around 10, I got through to an actual "search for tickets" page. I searched for 4, "best available", and it took me to a page where it shows you a picture of a distorted word and tells you to type it in the box to verify that you aren't an automated ticket buying system. Those distorted pictures of words disturb me. Either it reminds me of some horror movie when stuff is written in blood on the walls, or it just looks like the handwriting of a retarded 8 year old using a fat crayon. I don't know which one scares me more.

Anyways, the next page was a message saying the following:

"Your wait time is less than 1 minute. If you refresh or hit the back button, you will lose your place in line!"

It also included some sort of moving bar that didn't tell really represent any useful information about your waiting status, it just kind of hypnotizes you with a weird pattern of movement. So I guess I had to patiently wait for this page to refresh itself until it "found" some seats for me. My favorite part was when the page refreshed, and my wait time went from "less than 3 minutes" to "less than 5 minutes". That was always fun. Why don't you biatches just kick me in the nuts while you're at it, and we'll call it even?

Well, eventually I was given a page telling me that section 554, row 25, seats 5-8, would be reserved for me for the next 2 minutes. Where is section 554, you may wonder? Well, let's put it this way. When I went to the game on Tuesday, I turned to Chras, pointed to the far left field corner of the Upper Deck (all empty seats, I might add) and said something like "Man, those seats must really suck. Look how high up and steep they are." Of course, after consulting the seating chart, I found that section 554 was located in pretty much the heart of that exact area. SWEET....

With my 2 minutes quickly melting away, and seeing that each seat was $30 plus $5 TicketMaster fee, my final decision was, "Pork that, I ain't paying $35 a seat to sit in that hell hole, even if it is a Sox playoff game". For kicks and giggles, and because I enjoy self-inflicted suffering, I tried searching a few more times, and either came up with "no seats available" or even worse seats each time. So the conclusion of the story is, I didn't get any playoff tickets. Sorry if I got anyone's hopes up in the course of telling this long, drawn out story. Oh, another conclusion is, TicketBastard sucks.

*****

Mr. Burns: And to think, Smithers, you laughed when I bought TicketMaster. "Nobody's gonna pay a 100% service charge"

Smithers: Well, its a policy that ensures a healthy mix of the rich and the ignorant, sir.