Dept. of Technology

[kaffy_r]

Breathless Panic, Thy Name is Me

As anyone who has paid attention to my posts in recent weeks months possibly centuries knows, I'm going to the Aug. 28 BTS concert at Chicago's Soldier Field, with 19 other folks who I kinda sorta know thanks to the KPop discord community I'm involved in (and I have met a few of them in real life). I put my money into the shared box we'll be sitting in, and the organizer planned to email everyone their e-ticket. I had a brief discussion with her about how to move the ticket from Gmail to my Google wallet, which she advised everyone to do. I was a little confused, but thought I understood how to do it. 

I didn't give it a lot of thought until last night when I looked back at the discussion, saw it was in May and realized I'd never gotten the ticket. This morning, I contacted her about it, because I had a horrible feeling that I wasn't going to be able to get the ticket, and wouldn't be able to go to the concert, and wouldn't get the money back. Oddly, the loss of the money didn't bother me as much as the idea of not going to the concert. 

She asked me for my Gmail address and a few hours later she sent the ticket. 

Success!

Not quite

Try as I might, I couldn't get my wallet and my Gmail account to synch in order to get the ticket where it needed to go. I kept doing what seemed to be the right moves, only to see that both accounts seemingly failed to have the buttons that were supposed to be easy for me to access. I could see that I'd received notice of the ticket, and the notice kept telling me to get my ticket ready to use via Google wallet ... and I couldn't.

Cue even more panic. 

I finally looked at a short sentence at the bottom of the ticket. "Questions? Call xxx-xxx-xxxx." 

So I did. I didn't hold out much hope, because the phone number was for Soldier Field, and the ticket was Ticketmaster (I learned from the young man who I spoke to that the entities are joined at the hip; one is the umbrella owner of the other, although I can't recall which owns which, and that's neither here nor there, but I am nothing if not completist.) But the young man wouldn't give up on me. He kept telling me that I needed to be on Soldierfield.com, and not ticketmaster.com, and I was certain I'd actually signed into Soldierfield.com, but I couldn't be certain because of course this all had to be done on my mobile, while he and I were talking on our home phone. 

He tried a couple of things, then a couple more things. None of them worked. While he did that, and my voice got wobbly with incipient tears, I also hunted down things in my Google settings. I discovered that I hadn't enabled automatic synching between Gmail and the wallet, although I thought I'd done that. So I turned that on, and went back to working with the young man. 

Still, nothing worked, and my voice got even more wobbly and I said stupid stuff like "I'm 70 and I must be messing this up." 

Yep. Nothing worked. 

Until it did. 

Out of nowhere, out of some internet left field, I found the ticket and it transferred into the wallet. 

I literally (yes, I'll use the word the way it isn't supposed to be used because it's not a hill I'm going to die on) screamed "Oh my god! It's there! You did it!"

He said "We did it!" 

We both laughed and Bob shouted out "Give that man a raise!" I told him to have a good Tuesday, a good week, a good weekend, and a good rest of his life. 

And I now have the ticket. So I will be able to go to the concert. 

I'm sure I'll be panic-stricken about something connected to this tomorrow, but for now I'm basking in a severe lack of panic. 

Comments

[minnehaha]

WHEW!!!!!

K.

[kaffy_r]

I know, right?

[smallhobbit]

I know that horrible feeling exactly! Very glad you got it sorted 😃

[kaffy_r]

I'm glad I didn't let my voice wobble more than it did, and even more glad that it did somehow work out.

[lilacsigil]

Oh, hooray! I'm so glad it got sorted! I seem to be the local go-to person when health-related apps won't sync with each other and I've helped many people but sometimes there's just no reason and it will. not. go. Very frustrating when people are trying to get test results or link to their doctor's portal!

[kaffy_r]

As Bob keeps reminding me, computers are stupid, and I think that goes double for apps on phones. You're doing the lord's work in helping folks with their app problems - health related apps shouldn't screw up that way!

[rocky41_7]

This is too much stress 😭 This is why you should still have the option to just print the thing out and show it at the ticket gate! Glad you got it worked out though <3

[kaffy_r]

Yeah, I remember being quite taken aback when I was told that they wouldn't accept a printed ticket, that it had to be on your phone. Perhaps it's considered a way to beat fraud, but I also don't think there's so much ticket fraud going on that they need to make it even more difficult for folks who actually bought their tickets legally.

[rocky41_7]

Feels doubly silly when I've had experiences of attending events, even large ones, where I forgot even the printout and they just looked me up in the system! But I'm always ready to gripe about needing an app for something.

[kaffy_r]

Heh - I understand that instinct. When my laptop tells me that such and such an action would happen more quickly and/or more efficiently, I deliberately stick with the website version. It's not quite a hill I'll die on, but it's at least close to the hill.

[pameladean]

Sgh, I'm so glad it all worked out.

Long ago we all went to the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul to see Richard Thompson play. There was a monumental seating screw-up that we had to go to the house manager to repair. At one point I said plaintively that I'd filled out a detailed form for Ticketmaster, and the manager said, "Ticketmaster doesn't care."

So I'm glad Soldier Field does.

P.

[kaffy_r]

Thanks; the young man I was lucky enough to work with deserves all the praise for not simply hanging up on me when I was dithering and wobbling and not helping myself much.

[carbonel]

I'm so glad you got a helpful tech support person! Doesn't happen often enough, but they're gold when it does.

I hope you have a wonderful time at the concert.

[kaffy_r]

This young man was so helpful in steadying me when I was ready to collapse into a panicky pile of nerves - as Bob told him, he deserves a raise.

[elisi]

I am stressed just reading this. /o\

[kaffy_r]

Don't worry; everything turned out well - better than well, if you've read my next post.

[bibliofile]

Glad that it worked out, ahead of time even.

Looking forward to you post about the show, if you ever write one.

(A friend's sister flew in from Seattle for the show & came up to Madison for a couple of days, after. I love that this is an option: seeing K-pop bands live, in person, outside of Korea.)

[kaffy_r]

I was amazed at the number of people I met who have gone to multiple shows, traveling by air or by car to concert after concert. I'm croggled by the thought of how much this beats up their bank accounts, even if they're working and making really, really good money. It's kind of like Deadheads, but without patchouli and with a lot of business class flights. Heh.

What frightens me is that I've found myself thinking about how I'd try to go another concert - whether for BTS, Stray Kids, or Ateez. I'll have to watch myself carefully the next time summer concert season rolls around. Heh.