Rant #3,126: Ticket To Ride

Yesterday was an exasperating day on a number of levels.

I will tell you more about the day next week, but right now, let me tell you about the evening.

I watched professional wrestling with my son last night after a long, long day.

It kind of helped me to unwind a bit, and I watched pretty much the whole show with him.

Afterwards, I was still pretty wound up, and I thought I would do a couple of things that I needed to do before I went to sleep.

I had a bunch of mail that I had to go through, which I did, and then I went the electronic-mail route, going on my phone and checking my email before I finally was tired enough to go to bed.

I didn’t think there would be much in there, but to my astonishment, I had one message that caught my eye:

“Download your tickets.”

After the millisecond that it took for that to settle into my brain, I started to do just that, but let me backtrack a bit.

As you know if you are a regular reader of this column, my son is a huge fan of professional wrestling.

It is his go-to thing to watch on TV, and we have literally seen dozen of matches live in various arenas around the country, including locally, the Nassau Coliseum, the UBS Arena, Westbury Music Hall (or whatever they call it now), and Madison Square Garden.

He loves to see the matches live, and I have to admit that there is a certain electricity when you see pro wrestling live than when you see it on TV.

Last year, we went to a few such matches—including when we were on vacation in Atlanta—and we had a great time each time we went.

Well, this year, with the Nassau Coliseum and its operations totally on hold as the Nassau Hub project remains far up in the air—and with the Sands gambling organization now the operators of this huge white elephant—the WWE has steered clear of Long Island—one of its main fan bases—for live shows.

My son desperately wanted to go to a live show, and I finally relented, so we are going to see a WWE Smackdown show in early July.

It will be our first venture into Manhattan since the pandemic began—we were at a Knicks game the day prior to the world shutting down in March 2020—and I guess it is time to go through that brick wall and venture a bit our of our comfort zone.

So I scanned the Internet looking for the best ticket deal, and I came across a new secondary ticket site, and ordered the tickets through there.

That is when the problems started.

Somehow—and I don’t yet know how—the site used my two email addresses that I have to send me messages that my ticket order had gone through.

I became a little nervous about this, and when I tried to survey my order on the site, I was getting messages that my order was not there—even though the two email addresses had messages that my order had gone through.

I spoke to a representative from the ticket broker, and they assured me that everything was copacetic, providing me ways to view my order, even though not one of them actually worked.

This went on for a few days, but the broker said that yes, my order had gone through whether I could see it or not, and that I should await an email to tell me how to get the tickets—

Which I got last night, and that started a 90-minute odyssey that did not culminate in me actually getting the tickets in my possession—electronically—until about 11:30 p.m.

Again, I received two emails about the ticket availability in each of my email accounts, but each seemingly counteracted each other—as had the alert that my order had goner through that I told you about earlier—and I simply could not get the tickets.

I finally was able to pivot and received a message that my tickets would be retrievable through my respective email, but each time I tried to get them, I got the message that 1) “there are no tickets in your account” or 2) “something went wrong.”

Now, I cannot tell you how I finally got the tickets, but I never take “no” for an answer, even electronically, and somehow I was able to —through a lot of trial and error and maybe luck—actually see my tickets on my phone screen.

The suggestion by the site was to save them to Google Wallet, which I tried to do about a half dozen times, but it simply would not work, so I could now see the tickets, but I could not save them either to my email or to Google Wallet.

But then I came to thought that became the game changer: rather than save them together, how about saving them separately, or one at a time?

It took me a few minutes to figure that out, and lo and behold, it worked!

After literally after an hour and a half of drudgery, I finally had the tickets in my possession electronically.

This situation almost made me yearn for the day that you had to call to get tickets, or stand on a physical line, sometimes for hours at time, to get tickets.

And, of course, in those days, you received physical tickets, which are now pretty much a thing of the past.

Everything revolves around the phone, and the Internet, which I don’t think is as perfect a world as some might lead us to believe it is.

So I went to bed about 90 minutes later than I thought … but at least I went to bed knowing that I can tell my son when he gets up to go to work a little later this morning that we actually have the tickets in our “electronic” possession.

And that will make my son’s day, so I guess all the toil and trouble I went through was worth it …

Or at least I tell myself that.

Have a great weekend, and I will have plenty to tell you about what happened yesterday when I speak to you again on Monday.