Take Me Out To the Ballgame, Please

Here’s a little horror story about life in our digital days. My daughter thinks it wold be fun for four of us to go out to the local farm team’s ballgame for the Fourth of July. To eat a hot dog or maybe some peanuts and crackerjack (or all three), and after the game enjoy the holiday fireworks. What could be more All-American?

Once this would have been a no-brainer. Call or visit the box office, buy the tickets, pick them up at will call, bop through the turnstile and root-root-root for the home team. Today, it is like running a modern gantlet, a painful beating. But now at the hands of all-powerful algorithms, whatever they are.

So, she called the box office and identified her seats. And did they say thanks for your business, see you Tuesday? They did not. They said, oops our computers aren’t working right (Putin, no doubt). Just go online and use that awful, Decepticon website — Ticketmaster.

So instead of buying her tickets from the home team, she buys them from a grasping, greedy digital octopus now hated and loathed by a third generation of users. Why? Because they have been gouged for 20 percent or more of usurious handling and processing fees for every sporting, musical, arts performance that the TM monopoly controls access to.

Having no choice, she ponies up the bloated Ticketmaster tariff, despise the fact that a computer does the processing in a nanosecond, and no one ever handles a ticket that is now about as ephemeral as a bitcoin. It is the buyer who has to do the handling. But there’s the rub. Since she does not have a printer, she emails me the order and asks me to just print out the tickets.

Easier said than done. When I push the “print tickets” icon, I am told to input my Ticketmaster account information. But I don’t have a Ticketmaster account, and she is working for a living and can’t answer my cries for help. I figure I’ll just create my own account, but of course that doesn’t work.

Ticketmaster wants to me to log on using the same account used to buy the tickets, for which I don’t have the login and password. After wasting more of the limited amount of time I still have on earth, I figure out who to call for help, and I get to talk to a lovely robot who runs through her menu of options, none of which describe my particular problem.

After another interminable wait, I am finally put in touch with an actual human, but he is not empowered to behave in a humane manner. Rather, he follows the same decision tree and script as the robo-woman. If I don’t know the login and password, I need to know the last four digits of the credit card used to place the order, the phone number used to place the order, and be able to fax them her fingerprints and a scan of her left retina.


That last detail may be a slight exaggeration, but you get the drift. So, though she has bought the tickets, paid for the tickets, she does not possess the tickets. And since she hasn’t got a printer, they remain notional, not actual tickets.

A day later, during which I spend my time screaming into a pillow, she furnishes her Ticketmaster account login and password, her credit card number, her confirmation number, her employee badge number, and her DNA genome printout.

I feel I am getting close to a ticket. So I login, tell the machine to print tickets and it informs me this can’t be done from a mobile device, but only from a laptop or desktop computer. Swell, I am using a desktop computer. ‘Print,’ I say. ‘No,’ my digital overlords reply. I can only print tickets using Abode Reader which I will have to download.

I do so. I push ‘Print!’ No dice. I try everything I can think of, which isn’t much, but consumes another hour or so as I am told to create a Fox-it pdf or a Donder and Blitzen faux file or an Albion Roundabout. At the end of this travail, I still have nice pictures of the tickets on my screen, but no action from the printer, which appears to hate Ticketmaster as much as I do.

Finally, having abandoned all hope, as visitors to Hell are advised to do, I figure Ticketmaster has screwed me every other way it could think of, why not this one. So, I ignore their rule that I must print from a desktop or laptop. Instead, I start all over and poke “Print Tickets” on the email displayed on my verboten mobile device.

You guessed it. It prints perfectly. If this were a spectator sport, there would be wild cheering from the stands, as if for a walk-off grand slam home run. Instead, there is only muffled whimpering from me. But looking on the bright side, I have only wasted a day and a half and a quart of blood pressure medicine.

I understand that Ticketmaster is protecting my daughter and its monopoly from digital marauders who are as near as next door or as far away as Trump’s electoral colleagues in Russia or our “trading partners” in China. But for the average dope at home, just trying to attend a lousy, local ballgame, all this cyber hokey-pokey somewhat undercuts the joy of shopping online.

I know I am a senescent fuddy-duddy, but it isn’t clear this process has to be so user-unfriendly. Yes, I suppose, in this wicked old world of hackers everywhere, we should expect every online transaction to be a miserable experience. Most are.

But the greatest company in the history of the world, Amazon, seems able to smoothly, safely, and swiftly process any transaction and get it to my door without a Romanian hacker stealing my identity or bank balance, or forcing me to take a course in computer-as-a-second language.

In short, I know Amazon, Ticketmaster. Amazon is a friend of mine. And you are no Amazon. You are barely a polluted creek.

Luckily, the game is still a while off. By then, I may be able to sit in the sun and enjoy the crack of a bat and the flight of a ball into a summer sky without seething with rage at what it took to get there — having to deal with a system designed by cyborgs for cyborgs, just to have a little old-fashioned human fun.

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