#719 Encrypted Ticket

Scalpers have destroyed the internet. Okay, maybe that’s a little harsh, but it’s safe to say that the effect of scalpers overbuying tickets has made buying tickets online harder for regular people.
The other day I go to buy some tickets to a concert. I figure I’ll save myself the gas and buy online. I go to the Ticketmaster website and enter in the number of tickets I want. Then I enter in that I’m willing to pay for golden circle, and click on the “next” button.
The next screen features two scrawly words that are the internet’s new anti-scalper version of encrypting. Automatic computerized buyers aren’t supposed to be able to identify the words. They’re sort of scribbled and a line is running though them that really makes them hard to read.
I find out, after I’ve made a few mistakes, that they are case sensitive as well. Some of the words I can’t read accurately at all. Largely because the wavy line they have running through them cuts across a “c” sometimes and makes it look like a lower case “e” or an upper case C like an uppercase G and so on.
My question: If this encrypting method of squigglifying words is so effective, why are there two words on the screen?
Naturally, each mistake consumes expensive time I could be using more productively doing something else.
I finally get to the next page and it offers me two seats that suck. Down at the bottom it says, “Reserve these seats or give them up and try again?”
So that’s what I do. But I don’t get to just have their computer decide on two more tickets. I have to go back to the first screen and enter what and how many, back to the encrypting screen and decipher, and back to the next offer—which is two more seats that suck.
Again and again and again.
It’s gotta have something to do with scalpers. Not even the fee-sucking pirates at Ticketmaster would intentionally design something this inefficient.
So why don’t they have a real-time seating chart with what’s available?
And why am I suddenly playing a game of “Deal or No Deal?”
America, ya gotta love it.