ticketbast*rd

my brother is a huge cubs fan. his girlfriend is from st. louis. so i bought two tickets for him to the cubs/cardinals series this weekend. he decided to take me as his date.

i got them from a guy at work. also a huge baseball fan. he seems nice enough. but then he's like, 'i have to charge you a little over face value.' i was like, fine, i promised the little bro. then i found out i had to fork over 100 smackers.

last night i got off work at 4 a.m. the tickets were for today's game at 12:30. bleacher seats = get there early. we live in suburbia, so that meant my brother was shaking me awake at 8 a.m. hoping to get into the city by 10 so we could catch some express bus. needless to say, i move at reverse warp speed in the morning (especially when i've only gotten 2 hours' sleep). we didn't make it. but we did get there early. parked in a lot, took the elevated train, heckled a whole bunch of cardinal fans, and got into line.

oh, by the way, despite illinois being in the middle of a severe drought this summer. THIS was the day mother nature decided to play catch up. we were caught in a monsoon.

so there we are, standing in line at the stadium. it's 11 a.m. and there are at least 100 people in front of us, who obviously got there yesterday to stand in line. we're listening to these 40-year-old men rip on each other for their team affiliations as if they were in line to buy clearasil at the drugstore for the big eighth grade dance this weekend. it was sad. but they were drunk.

we get up to the ticketperson, who fidgets around with them awhile before she tells us our tickets aren't registering in the machine. jiggawhat? my bro and i look at each other in dismay. then the woman -- who had the best front-tooth gold outline i have seen in a really long time -- tells us that these tickets are bogus; that the person who had purchased them at the window had canceled his order and that his credit card had been refunded that same day he had bought them. in february. however, the tickets had already been printed and mailed out. the woman had already confiscated the other two out of the four that were bad. the bossman felt bad for us, a pair of wet rats who weren't going to see the big show afterall. he said they were all sold out, even of standing room by that point, but if we took a walk down the street, we might just find something. (that was kind, considering he's not supposed to endorse scalping.)

but i was livid. i f-ing got up at the bootycrack of dawn. for WHAT? to get rejected at the door while dodging the cats and dogs falling from the sky? uh-uh. i don't THINK so. after much discussion we realized that in order to get into the game, we'd have to part with the better part of $300. my bro was pretty bummed. he goes back to school far away next week.

i, of course, couldn't go home because i had to work tonight. so we rode the train up and down a few times to hide from the rain and dry out a little. it didn't really work.) we went out for hamburgers and prayed the game would get rained out as poetic justice. it was delayed (and i would have had to leave at inning 4 had we even gotten inside, so i was secretly happy about that). we perused the mall, and my brother bought me a very snazzy new handbag because he was feeling generous. it didn't turn out to be such a horrid day, afterall.

come tuesday, i wouldn't want to be that chump who took me for 100 for broke-ass tickets.