March 13, 2018
Tsudo Nim
With the summer months edging closer, it can only mean one thing: concert season is starting.
The ultimate way to spend your summer is to attend at least one concert or festival for a musician you love. However, the ticket-selling industry is just as corrupt as it’s always been. Practice caution so that you don’t fall victim to a multinational ticket-scalping ring that’s been allowed to continue operating for years.
This past month, I’ve been looking into tickets for the electronic music trio that defined my adolescence performing at Red Rocks in June.
As always, the best place to start looking for tickets is with the musicians’ tour website. This is almost always legitimate.
But, as oft happens in such a cruel world as ours, the tickets are scalped by bots that are stalking these venue sites… waiting, lurking… hunting for their fun-loving concert-going prey.
I refreshed this webpage for an hour waiting for the tickets to go on sale, not knowing the sisyphean task ahead of me. It felt as if the color drained from the vibrant almost-spring vista outside of my window when I saw that all 9,500 seats at that incredible venue were sold out before I could even click “check-out.”
I resorted to making a deal with the devil: ScalperHub.ru. I found the only tickets I could afford, sitting on top of my car on the far edge of the parking lot to try and hear anything at all. Perfect.
But some ingenious piece of work decided that they could squeeze even more profit out of my glowstick-holding hands and charge an insanely high service fee of $1500 for my cramped parking spot.
I venture forth, however, in my quest to see a music trio which defined my music taste for as far back as I can remember. I have to get these tickets. Caution falls to the wayside and emotion wins over, and buying these tickets becomes a pure, nostalgic necessity.
I hit the “checkout” button in the bottom right hand corner of the page and the timer starts counting down. What will befall me if I don’t finish my purchase before that timer runs out?
Suddenly, 15 pop-ups appear.
One advertises loss protection for my entirely digital ticket, another advertises a minimal seat upgrade from what I bought. Three advertise concerts in West Virginia. But it’s the last one that draws my eye: ticket insurance.
Ticket insurance was invented by the same guy who invented “internet convenience fees,” and was given three promotions in two minutes.
What does ticket insurance do? Nobody knows; not even the person who invented it knows.
By the time I navigate through this maze of additional fees like the mouse ScalperHub.ru thinks I am, the timer is down to 30 seconds. Reaching down for my wallet, I realize it is missing.
I turn my room upside down looking for it. Eventually, I find it in the third drawer of a cabinet I’ve never opened in my life. Rejoicing briefly in my minor success, I turn back to my computer only to see that the timer in the bottom right-hand corner has reached zero.
This is it: the nightmare scenario.
I wake up in a cubicle somewhere, even though I never went to sleep. Something’s off: the lighting is too artificial, the post-its that adorn the Dell monitor are almost my handwriting, but not really. Beside all of this, there is no actual exit to the cubicle.
The phone rings, and, instinctively, I pick up the receiver and say, “Thank you for calling ScalperHub technical support, how can I help you?”
And that’s why I prefer Scalperhub.ru to any other ticket company.