i was about to type up the whole long affair with what happened with ticketmaster, but halfway through i got bored and erased it. seriously, what can i say about buying tickets via ticketmaster that has not been said before. they’re incompetent, their web site user interface is horrible, they often lie to you, and the “convenience” fees are an insult. suffice it to say that i wasted a lot of time trying to give them a pile of cash. i attempted to buy White Sox Ozzie Plan tickets — a 13-game package where you get to pick your games (in two minutes or less — thanks, TicketMaster!) — over and over and over only to be rebuffed with incoherent errors which not even phone support could explain (although they tried, by insisting that the Ozzie Plan tickets were only available for one day, which was not that day … this was after i had to tell them what the Ozzie Plan was, so their judgment was a little suspect). on my first (and final) successful trip at picking games that did not result in inexplicable errors from ticketmaster.com, i was almost rebuffed in the end when it locked my account out due to incorrect password attempts (when i had logged in to it about 10 minutes previously just fine) and told me to call the White Sox to have it reset (?!???!!?) but ended up creating a new email address on the fly — thank god i own and operate my own domain name, and can do things like that — and completed the transaction.

or so i thought. days and days passed, and the charge didn’t post to my discover card. i expect things to take a day or two to post, but it was five days in and i was starting to fret. then i tried logging in to ticketmaster.com with my (newly created just for this purchase) account, and it claimed it didn’t exist. …great.

finally, though, the charge did post to my discover card (probably the only time in my life i have ever been relieved to have a charge applied to my credit card), and i heaved a sigh of relief. all that was left at that point was for the tickets to be lost in the mail.

but!

could it be??

IT IS!!

miracle of miracles, the tickets actually arrived! before the season actually started, even! HOORAY!!!

now, all i have to do is wait for april. :)