Electronic

Isn't technology something?

You can take that as an expression of amazement or a criticism. Based on an experience I had today, I mean it both ways.

The task was simple enough. I wanted to purchase a ticket for the University of Dayton's first round NIT game against Illinois State on Wednesday.

According to the information I found, the arena box office would not be selling tickets over the phone to the general public. Nuts. I've preferred this option for the simple fact that it's a way to dodge most of the so-called convenience and service fees.

So I pulled up the page on the Ticketmaster website and kept refreshing until the time when tickets were to be released. 9 a.m. arrived and I put in for one "best available" ticket. Strangely, the computer could not locate a single seat. I tried a few more times and kept getting the same result. Using my criteria (one ticket, any price, best available), the system was unable to find a match.

Keep in mind that this game was scheduled just twelve hours earlier and had not been put on sale until this moment. Surely the season ticket holders hadn't gobbled up every seat. A call to the box office to confirm that this was the correct process produced what was likely be a lengthy wait (and probably a displeased ticket seller on the other end), so I turned to the other tool at my disposal: the telephone.

I looked up the local Ticketmaster number only to call it and discover that it was no longer in service. Instead a national toll-free line had taken its place. The initial prompts required voice commands, which was slow but so be it. Then I realized that the entire system operated on voice commands.

In one way, this is really amazing. I "spoke" with a computer that turned my verbal answers into a ticket order with my name, address, telephone number, credit card number, and confirmation number. It even took a reasonable but wrong stab at pronouncing my last name. Wow!

In another way, this is really annoying. I doubt that the process was faster than talking with an operator and may have been slower. For instance, it took a few tries to find the event I wanted. And oh yeah, the fees were more than the face value of the ticket--$5.70 in fees for a $5 ticket--but then again, the quoted ticket cost was less than what I read it would be.

I checked the website later in the day to see if available tickets were showing up. They were. I checked again a bit later after that out of curiosity of where the available seats were located. Now the ticket price was at $10 before fees.

So, in the battle with technology I won! Or at least I'm victorious until I go to pick up the ticket and they tell me that my order has been cancelled due to an error. This hasn't happened--and I'm not expecting it to--but I have just enough doubt about how this all went down that it wouldn't surprise me either.