Want to see Elton John on Mom's Weekend? Unless you have a crap load of money, you probably are like the majority of WSU students and won't be going. It is hypocritical for this to be promoted as a Mom's Weekend event, yet there is no special preference given to WSU students or their mothers, while scalpers run rampant charging ridiculous prices on the Internet. I know their were of people who were online at exactly 10 am, calling continuously for 3 hours, and waited in line at Beasley but were still unable to get tickets. Ticketswest claims their server only went out for 6 minutes during that time period. In reality, the online ticketing system was down for much longer than this. Any time there is large demand for a concert or event this is likely to happen, but it doesn't help that WSU recommended to students that "going online at www.ticketswest.com will give you the best opportunity to purchase tickets..".
It also says on the Beasley website and releases from Ticketswest that "TicketsWest is pleased to have assisted the Beasley Performing Arts Coliseum in selling out the Elton John performance scheduled for April 12, 2008." Hey, at least you don't have to rub it in that you screwed thousands of students and their Moms over. Interestingly enough, when I sent an email Friday to Ticketswest, I received this message:
"We're sorry but this onsale generated a tremendous amount of interest, with demand far outweighing availability. Throughout most of the onsale, our web servers experienced over 6,000 concurrent connections. Qwest reported that at one point we had over 5,000 calls per minute running through their circuits to our call center. The TicketsWest ticketing system was fully functional and transacted orders from all sales channels throughout the onsale period. Due to the heavy traffic to the website, on two separate occasions, at 10:21 AM and 11:12 AM respectively, TicketsWest engineers displayed the TicketsWest maintenance page for a period of approximately 6 minutes in order to allow existing traffic already on the TicketsWest.com site to complete pending transactions.
Funny, that's exactly what it says on the Beasley website with "I'm sorry" added to the beginning. Thanks for the shit customer service Ticketswest. There are rumors of a possible second Elton John concert in Pullman, but I think that has the same chances of Oregon State winning the Pac-10 in basketball.
So what can you do about this? First of all, give all the asshole scalpers on Ebay and craigslist a piece of your mind. Second, complain to the people responsible or with power in this situation:
- Michelle Poesy, Mom's Weekend Event Coordinator, michellep@wsu.edu, 509-335-4809
- TicketsWest Corporate Office, info@ticketswest.com, 509-459-6100
- Jack Lucas, President of TicketsWest, jack.lucas@ticketswest.com, 509-459-6100
- Leo Udy, Director of Beasley PAC, udy@wsu.edu, 509-335-3748
- Fran Curtis, Elton John contact at Rogers and Cowan, fcurtis@rogersandcowan.com, 212- 455-8418
- Elson Floyd, WSU President, floyde@wsu.edu, 509-335-6666
Finally join the Facebook group, write a letter to the Evergreen, and stay tuned to The Crimson Life for the latest information. Let's show them WSU students, in the words of the great Elton John:
Don't give us none of your aggravation
We had it with your discipline
Saturday night's alright for fighting
Get a little action in
UPDATE:
Here is contact information for the local Spokane news stations (not KAYU)
- KREM 2 - newsdesk@krem.com
- KXLY 4 - News4@kxly.com
- KHQ 6 - q6news@khq.com
(Image Beasley Performing Arts Coliseum Website)
2 comments:
Say...I'm a 46-year old dad who was looking forward to seeing Elton John with my WSU student daughter, and that website was NOP at 10:00:05am. I tried multiple times, and even by telephone.
Not handled well at all.
Lucky for me, I've seen EJ in concert back when I was in college, but it would've been nice to share the event with my daughter. Truth be told, I was looking forward to it (even on "mom's weekend".) Too bad for us.
So yeah: this sucked.
"Wankers."
How about promoting a venue change to Martin Stadium which seats over 35,000 w/o adding seating on the field. I'm told Beasley had poor acoustics for Doobie concert. Martin Stadium could only be better. EJ should be able to set up at a stadium. Rock concerts have been held at stadiums many times.
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