I wasn’t sure whether to put this in the Pit or here, but I’ve tried to keep it sweary-free:
I live in a 4 bedroom house that is part of a student halls. Ergo, everyone in my house and everyone in my neighbouring house is in or travelling to or from Uni between 9 and 5 every weekday. The house is seldom occupied between 9 and 5 on a weekday. This is important to the forthcoming story.
So I ordered the tickets for a rock night with bands from a certain online ticket shop which I will not name. I didn’t realise this at the time, but apparently they can’t just send tickets through the post anymore, they have to use this courier service instead. So I put my debit card number in the ticket site and get a reference number by e-mail, and wait for the tickets to come. This was over a month before the rock night.
The week before the rock night is my exam week, with three important exams in my course, spread across the week. I still don’t have any tickets. As such, it is extra essential that I go into Uni every morning and stay there until the evening. Tuesday of exam week, and I get home in the evening to find a note on my doormat: “We tried to deliver your [tickets] today and you weren’t in”.
Well, DUH!
a) You didn’t tell me what day you were going to come and deliver them, so how could I know to stay in to sign for them?
b) Even if you had told me, I couldn’t have stayed in between 9 and 5 on that day anyway.
So I rang the courier people up. I said “I know you now have my tickets, and I’ve had this problem before (when I ordered my Barclaycard). Last time, after you cocked up (after I missed the delivery the first time, I asked you to deliver the following Wednesday, you said OK, and then you went ahead and tried to deliver on the following Tuesday instead for some crazy reason), you sent my card to the sorting office in town so I could sign for it there instead. If you could do that again everything’ll be dandy”.
No!
Apparently the courier company don’t mind doing this, but the ticket bods won’t let them (this took about 5 phone calls of varying expense across three evenings to finally establish).
The courier company were actually fairly reasonable from this point onwards. We eventually agreed over the phone that due to the unusual circumstances they’d deliver them on a Saturday (they don’t normally do Saturdays for letter deliveries). This they did–even if their time-of-day estimate was hopelessly inaccurate. So I did get the tickets…
…but, in a way that was inconvenient for me (as I had to sit in the house all day on Saturday when I could have been out shopping or whatever), and for the courier people.
So my pitting (or MPSIng, in this case), is really targeted at the daft policies of the ticket company. These tickets cost less than 20 pounds (about $40). It cost me almost half of that again in phone calls to try and get the delivery sorted out, and the possibility was there that I would not be able to get the tickets in time for the event, in which case I would have lost my money. (For instance, if I had popped out on the Saturday and missed the courier that day too).
Surely I can’t be the only one whose living arrangements preclude signing for stuff in this way? Particularly since students must be one of the biggest markets for rock concert tickets. But the ticket company’s attitude when I rang them and complained about not being able to get a hold of my tickets was as though I was the only one who ever had this problem.
Any advice regarding future purchases? This compulsory courier delivery seems to be getting more and more widespread.