Booking tickets for people in wheelchairs.

I'm not going to really focus on this blog post much, because it's fairly negative but I need to share this. I feel it's an integral part of this entire wheelchair+concert business that shows the darker side of not even being at the concert yet and facing problems.

Today, me and Daniel and some friends went to West Edmonton Mall. I was going to pick up some theory books for my keyboard (fuck yes instruments! :3) and we were going to pick up tickets for the Transiberian Orchestra. I've never seen them live, it's apparently pretty fucking rad. Classical music mixed with metal, with lasers? I'm in. So the day goes by without incident, and I get my theory books.

I'm in a relatively good mood, surrounded by friends, musical instruments. So then we get to Ticketmaster.

Every single fucking time I deal with Ticketmaster, they dick me around! It takes needlessly longer than needed to get my tickets to events. They end up not having the system either through over the phone and have to transfer me eighteen billion times or we go into a guest services directly and they end up taking 30 minutes to complete it.We've booked numerous events through out the years, (HIM, Avenged Sevenfold, Sonata Artica, Great Big Sea, Dane Cook, Kathy Griffin..) and it's all been the same! Every fucking time.. Normally I would just start buying directly from the venues but that's not the way it works because Ticketmaster has the monopoly and then they'll double book the accessible seat and blah.. That's never fun. They even go so far as to do it for our shitty little baseball team (I happen to love baseball) and so I just fucking book through them.

Anyways, we get to Ticketmaster, and not surprisingly.. we waited.. for an hour! Finally, I left the line up.. Daniel was still waiting while the women was on the phone trying to get an answer out of head office. At the hour and a half mark, the woman hung up her phone and told us we had to go to the venue and purchase the tickets directly through them, because she couldn't help us.. Because I was in a wheelchair. What would and SHOULD have taken ten minutes took an hour and a half.

So now, we have two options, bus to the Jubilee which is fucking FAR away from us and purchase the tickets there (with no assurance of them actually having them, they actually couldn't even tell us if they did or not..) or just not go. Thanks Ticketmaster.

It's things like this that make me feel like I'm just a huge burden and that I'm getting in the way all the time. When there's stairs instead of an elevator, or I have to wait outside a store that people want to go in and I get kind of upset inside. Or even when people have to be inconvenienced BECAUSE of me.

Some times I think it would just be so much simpler if I just stayed at home and just stopped going places.