This post is not about 60646. It’s not even about real estate. This post is a product of anger and deep disappointment. No wait, deep disappointment and anger, in that order. What happened? Hannah Montana is coming to the United Center in Chicago to perform her “Best of Both Worlds” concert. And Ticketmaster let thousands of parents down. Again. They are the grinch who stole Christmas. And the joys of the upcoming new year.

Let me back up here for a minute. We have an 8-year old who, like millions of other American kids, is infatuated with Miley Cyrus (a.k.a. Miley Stewart) in the award-winning Disney television series “Hannah Montana”. Pre-teens and teens alike, adore this young lady who, in real life, is the daughter of the venerable Billy Ray Cyrus, the country singer who “achy broke your heart” back in 1992. Incidentally, Billy Ray plays the character of Miley Cyrus’ dad in the TV show, as well. But I digress.

This past summer, news broke that Miley Cyrus and her band were going to perform a concert at the Allstate Arena in November. My wife, her sister, her cousins and her female friend-moms were all over this news. Tickets to the show were supposed to be ordered online, through Ticketmaster, at a very specific date, and at a very specific time of the day. Pull up a chair in front of your computer, well ahead of time, and get ready to become a sniper, ’cause you know that hundreds of thousands of other parents in the Chicagoland area are doing the same thing, at that very moment. You snooze, you lose. Okayfine. 11:00am came, and my wife pulled the trigger. Unusually large amounts of bits and bytes were flying over the Internets. Adrenalin was flowing. Expectations were high. Then the disappointment: everything was sold out. Frantic phone calls ensued: Were you able to get any tickets? No, were you? No. How can that be? We were on time.

While the ladies were analyzing, for days, possible reasons for their failure to obtain tickets to the show online, CNN was delivering the explanation: Ticket brokers. Truly, an American tragedy. But we all got over it, eventually. Especially our kids, because they witnessed first-hand that it wasn’t for their parents’ lack of trying. And they understood (at least our daughter did) that refusing to pay a ticket broker $1,000 per ticket didn’t qualify as “lack of trying”.

Encouraged by their success, the Hannah Montana Team announced a couple of days ago that they’d be returning with their “Best of Both Worlds Tour” to our neck of the woods, this time to the United Center, in January of next year. Uh oh, here we go again. Wife got a hand massage and a manicure, in anticipation of some serious keyboard work to come. Same rules as before: Ticketmaster.com. Specific date, specific time. Fire. This time though, we had a slick new game plan: My wife would go to her workplace, and attempt to get tickets from her work computer, while I would be at home doing the same thing from the home computer. I believe that’s called “improving the odds”. Watches were synchronized, and we’re now in direct contact on speakerphone. The clock strikes 11:00am, and we’re both typing away. First, ticket quantities and seat preferences have to be specified. Then, we’re being directed to a screen where we’re required to type a security word (captcha) to let the system know that we’re indeed humans requesting tickets rather than software bots, or *GASP*, ticket brokers. The anticipation is now building, because the next screen shows this:

Then the letdown:

Say what? Couldn’t find tickets that matched my request? How can that possibly be? It’s not even 11:01am yet. My wife and I each are on a high-speed Internet connection, and there are what, maybe 20,000 tickets for sale for this event? We didn’t even specify any seats or prices. Anything is fine with us. Nose-bleed section, go ahead. $66, no problem. We’re like the customers who order Jambalaya soup from the soup-nazi in Seinfeld: Anything you wanna give us is fine, just let us see the concert. Pretty please. No soup for you! Next!

Ticketmaster. No more soup for you, buddy.

Update: Finally, without having to remortgage our house or to liquidate a few 401K accounts, we managed to purchase a couple of tickets from an acquaintance that wasn’t able to attend the concert. My wife was ill, so I took our daughter to the UC. She had a blast, and from all the screaming, she almost lost her little voice. As for me, the music of Aly & AJ, and Hannah Montana isn’t really up my alley, but every once in a while during the show, I caught myself shakin’ a tailfeather, but then quickly looked left and right to make sure that nobody was giving me the “act your age” look. Here are a couple of short video clips that I shot from Aly & AJ, and from Hannah Montana (the latter one is a little blurry).

Hannah Montana Image credit: Mike Schmid via flickr licensed under Creative Commons 2.0

Popularity: 1% [?]