Taylor who?

As many of you know I’m in the middle of a big move, moving an institution to a new home for three months and then returning to a newly renovated building. Yesterday was the actual day for our office move and we were crazy. However, it was also the day, or so my daughter told me, that one could order pre-sale Taylor Swift tickets through American Express and Ticketmaster.
My daughter begged and demanded, whichever would work, for me to order the tickets for the Saturday evening performance in Toronto in July, and to do it at 10:00 a.m. when it went on line.

You must be an American Express cardholder to order, and I am one of those, so I had to do it. Besides, my wife and daughter couldn’t possibly get to a computer and of course, having so little to do in my life, I should be clearly able to do it.

We had no internet at work as ours had been turned off so we could pack electronics for moving, and I had the only Wi-Fi laptop around. My only hope was the local, young and sort of hip coffee shop in town.

I put my laptop in a plastic garbage bag as it was raining and I had no available carrier, and I went off at 9:45 a.m. to check out the coffee shop. Yes, they had Wi-Fi so I got my coffee and booted up.

My daughter had sent me a link and I am a registered Ticketmaster customer so it was easy to get there. I opened the purchase tickets as close to 10:00 as possible, and I was in an electronic queue for a ten minute wait while the electronic program counted down.

Once there, I chose a price and it chose some seats, and then had two minutes to make a decision or start again. I opened the seating chart as fast as possible and it looked OK, even though the price was more than she wanted to spend, it just made sense to me, and at that time and I only had two minutes to decide.

I clicked OK and it took me to the payment and delivery method, which was another two minutes of quick decisions.

Mail the tickets (the right choice I am told) and quickly put in the numbers of my card and my name and address etc. I forgot to bring my glasses and squinted my way through it but I screwed up the credit card numbers, of course. It worked out OK, but it said I wasn’t finished, as I had to choose a credit card type. I was on an American Express page but I never checked the American Express button. At the same time my clock was quickly moving forward. With seconds to spare I bought two medium priced tickets that with taxes and fees came out to $211, only $11 more than my first car!

In the end, I went to the proprietor and thanked him for the internet, explaining my daughter would be thankful because I was able to get on line and order Taylor Swift tickets as soon as they were available.

His response was, “Taylor who?’

Maybe he wasn’t as hip as I had assumed. He admitted that his favorite singer (after I explained who Taylor Swift was) was Ella Fitzgerald, even though she was dead.