11 minutes 17 seconds navigating phone menus, on-hold time, and speaking with two people. First one verified my order number (called confirmation number on their emails), name, address, and credit card number. He reported that the tickets shipped on the 7th. Interesting that they sent the "Your tickets have been printed!" email on the 8th. Evidently their printers and shiping department are faster (but not more reliable) than their computers. After reiterating that I had not received my tickets for the following day's concert, he said he'd transfer me to customer service. What the hell was he? The call-screener? The customer service rep made me perform the exact same dance, then told me I could pick my tickets up at the event location. "Bring your ID, order number, and credit card." Joy, now I have to carry extra crap into a concert. The worrying part was this comment: "Yeah, looks like there's plenty of tickets left to that event." So...if it was sold out, would I be screwed?
I have tickets for two more upcoming events pending. One was "printed!" on the 13th...first class U.S. Mail probably should have brought that one to me by now. Hopefully I won't have to go through this bull again.
This is the service I paid a $6.00 "convenience" (Har har! Oh that kills me!) fee and a $2.35 "order processing" charge for? I'm also fond of how the fees are not flat, and appear to be based on the ticket price. You and I both know it's more expensive to print a $30.00 ticket than a $20.00 one. And why are there "building facility" charges? Shouldn't that be part of the ticket price? If I buy at the box office, do I pay that? Sounds like a scam to make more money for the event promoters and hosters, since bands likely get a cut of "ticket price" only.
This so-called service is definitely worth boycotting. Master of Tickets my arse.
(forgive the ranting nature of the post; I'm at work and can't take the time to edit)
Wil Wheaton is now writing a weekly column for The Onion's A.V. Club. His first contribution should appear tomorrow. I encourage you to check it out, as his writing is a pleasure to read. I also recently finished his two books, Dancing Barefoot and Just A Geek, and strongly recommend both. I both laughed my fool head off and was brought to tears by his stories. I wish Wil's events brought him closer to LNK so I could attend one of his readings. I'd also love to see an ACME theatre performance, but I'm fairly sure I'll have to go to L.A. for that, no matter what.
Why do spammers have to try and ruin every thing that is good? Can't they just leave the world in peace? I thwarted their automated attempts to comment-spam my site by implementing a CAPTCHA test, but I was just nailed with a new tactic: TrackBack Ping spam. I'm of course not alone:
The flood of truly vile Trackback spam today sadly confirms what I was worried about months ago: if we lock down commenting (with things like WP Hashcash and Typekey) it’ll just push them to Trackback. All the captcha in the world won’t fix Trackback.
I'm deleting all the existing spam, but I'm sure new ones will appear before I decide on a solution (probably one or more of the techniques suggested at Learning Movable Type). If any show up attached to this entry, I'll leave them as examples, but anything else is toast.