Pasteurization

April 23, 2010

Homogenizing and Pasteurizing of Good Things

Dear Students

...ruins them. MLB (“Major League Baseball, the corporation) has taken over the websites of all the minor league teams, not to speak of the majors. They are all the same, with corporation-appointed scribes and a corporation-appointed ticket vendor, the infamous Ticket Masters.

I may no longer telepone the Zephyrs box office. The number has been suppressed. There is a rambling and remonstrative description of the office hours, rules and regulations, but no number. If you called the Zephyrs they might actually know you. That’s prohibited.

I used to telephone and order my seat on the phone. I could pick the precise location, within limits of availability. I knew the section, the row, the seat I wanted. I knew the ladies who work there, by name, and they me.

No more. Ticket Master won’t let you choose the section number; they do that. You get to vaguely choose “left field,” “third base”. Ordering through Ticket Master is like ordering anything through a big corporation online. Only worse.

It is predictable. The bigger the corporation, the worse the site. Did you ever try ATT? Try clicking the button “Automatic monthly bill payment”. You know what it will do? Destroy your ability to ever pay your bill except by snail mail. Sites of swank elite products are just as bad, only worse. They are so insensitively and 'elegantly' designed that old eyes like mine cannot read their mauve and washed font colors. Try Montblanc. You’ll see.

With Ticket Master you have to create a special “Secure code”, not to confuse with “security code,” the infamous three-digit number on the back of your credit card. The notion of the secure code is a good one; it protects the consumer, or at least provides another putative, thin layer of protection. The problem is it is stupidly named and stupidly designed. Stupid and stupefying.

And another thing: it asks your for your card’s PIN, (or rather, in crass ignorance, ‘PIN number’).

Is this impudent gall or stupidity, or both?

I lucked out this time. The woman who processed my order, a real woman with blood in her veins and a brain in her head, recognized me by my pasteurized order, somehow, and gave me what she knew I would like. She also handed me my ticket at Will Call. “Here you are, Mr. George.”

This doesn’t happen in MLB.
gmc