Ticket trouble

There is a specific frustration caused by organisational inefficiency. Its just part of the basket of psychological ailments perched wobblingly on the end of the bicycle that is modern life, deflated tyres and all.

Tickets don’t arrive in the post. Have they been nicked again by a quickfingered postie at the sorting office? Or not sent? Wrongly addressed? Computer error? Not printed yet? Sitting on someone’s desk?

So I ring the ticket office but a soft voiced girl shows complete indifference. She says that tickets are not normally sent out until a week before the event. I know this to be untrue, having just checked my collection of tickets for this venue, which covers the next 18 months, all tickets having been received by me within days of making the booking. She says that she cannot check if the tickets have been posted. She tells me to ring customer services, that they can tell me. But customer services turns out to be a recorded message telling me to ring the ticket office for tickets enquiries, or if I am ringing about access, to contact the security officer at the stage door. I shall leave the security officer until nearer the time.

There is of course nothing remarkable about such encounters. They just swim up to the shore and beach themselves in front of you, sapping your time and energy.

I reply to the sender of the e mail which confirmed my booking, but that bounces, as I knew it would. The website only offers me someone called “webeditor” so I e mail him or her, in the hope that at least I can make them waste some of their time, if only in forwarding my e mail to someone else within the organisation, someone who will probably also be the wrong person, or who will forget about it, or will try and steal my identity, or will be so inundated with all sorts of e mails that they will not realise that mine is sitting there waiting for their attention.

So I shall visit the ticket office in person, and affecting frailty, shall beg and wheeze until I achieve some resolution.

In such situations I find it best to adopt the persona of Alan Bennett: a sense of being out of one’s time and permanently baffled and befuddled normally does the trick.