As many, if not all, of you know, Jennifer is a nut for March Madness. She'll go months without watching college basketball, but when March gets here she's suddenly glued to the TV.
So when it was announced the first and second rounds were going to be in North Little Rock, I knew we were going. Luckily, my name was selected in the ticket lottery and we paid $300 for two tickets in the upper deck.
All was right with Jen's March Madness world (though if she never had to hear Bill Raftery say "with the kiss!" or "Onions!" it would be even better).
Then a friend of mine in central Arkansas tells me he's got two tickets with my name on them ... in the lower deck. I naturally accept his offer.
Our paid tickets are suddenly not needed, so I list them on StubHub.com. StubHub is a very reputable and expansive online ticket broker. No scalping tickets outside the stadium, instead you do it via the Internet and the buyer and seller never meet, speak, e-mail nor even know each other's names.
Our tickets get bid up to $450 on Monday. We've just made a profit on them. That's when the trouble starts.
I log in to my StubHub account and try to confirm the transaction. I get an error message. I call customer service and am told there's no record of the sale at all. They check my account and whoops, there was a transaction. I'm bumped from customer service to a supervisor who tells me in all the years the site has been running, they've never had this happen. And they'll fix it within 24 hours.
In the meantime, I'm getting an e-mail from StubHub on my .Mac account on the average of once every 10 minutes. Sometimes I'll get two in a one-minute span. But I'm averaging six an hour, 144 per day. Each one is exactly the same, telling me to confirm the order ASAP.
I call customer service again, ask them to please make the e-mails stop. At this point, I realize we aren't going to turn a profit (much to Jen's chagrin) because it's too late to do an online sale and ship the tickets to somebody. And since I don't want a "Sports Editor Arrested For Scalping" headline to be in Saturday's paper, I'm not about to work a corner outside of Alltel.
Luckily, Dad's extensive contacts came through. I just unloaded the tickets for what we paid for them (including shipping and handling) to one of Dad's buddies.
The StubHub e-mails haven't stopped yet. I got two while typing this post.
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3 comments:
Yech. I've never had any problem with them, but I've always been a buyer. Sucks for the dude who "bought" your tickets too.
It really sucks for the dude who "bought" the tickets -- I wonder if he's been notified, or if his credit card went through and he's now waiting for FedEx to show up.
I'm still pissed we didn't make a profit! However, I am PUMPED to be 13 rows from the court. Now I gotta decide which teams to cheer on (not Texas!).
I'm the dude that bought your tickets...just kidding
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