Super Dupe

Oh man, have I got the kvetch of all kvetches today. This one was a doozy.

Last night I went with my girlfriend and two friends to a concert - the Killers at the Hollywood Bowl. A couple weeks earlier, my girlfriend found a guy selling tickets on Craig'sList: four for $100 each in the Garden Box seats. The face value of the tickets was about $135, so this was a great deal (obviously you can see where this is going). Nevertheless, my girlfriend said she caught the posting about a minute after it went up and the guy claimed he was selling them cheap because he needed cash quickly, so we just thanked our lucky stars and snatched them up.

My friend Adam actually went to meet the guy to pick up the tickets, because he lives not far from where the guy was. He actually remarked that the ticket seller was a nice guy, and that he told him the tickets had been given to him as a gift, but that he couldn't use them because he had been invited to the USC-Ohio State game, and he needed cash quick to get a plane ticket. Stupidly, none of us thought to question this based on the fact that the football game was last weekend, and the concert was on a Wednesday. In one ear and out the other. But I guess when someone tells you a story that's too stupid to actually be true, it's just human nature to assume that it is.

So, here we go. My girlfriend goes and picks up a whole smorgasbord of picnic supplies - two shopping bags full of food, because our "tickets" are to a four person box with a picnic table. We take a cab to the Bowl, nice and early, walk through the security checkpoint, up to the ticket takers, who use their little sensor gun to scan our tickets, and...BEEP-BOOP.

I had never heard the BEEP-BOOP before when having my ticket scanned. It's usually just a happy, upbeat BEEDLE-BEEP! This BEEP-BOOP was a discouraging sound, like when a contestant gives the wrong answer on a game show. The ticket taker looked at her gun. "Invalid ticket," she said. She scanned my girlfriend's ticket. Same sound. Same response from the ticket taker.

We all looked at each other, stunned. We continued exchanging stunned looks as someone led us to a security office and explained that we had been ripped off. They showed us three other packets of fake tickets with our exact seat numbers that other naive rubes had been sold by the same brilliant but dastardly con artist. A regular Frank Abignale Jr. had gotten his hands on us.

As this was happening, I flashed back in my mind to when my friends had shown up at my house prior to the concert and handed me my ticket. I recalled a brief blip of a thought going through my brain at the time that the ticket didn't feel quite exactly like a real ticket...the texture of it was almost imperceptably off...but this fraction of a notion quickly vanished - most likely because someone put a cocktail in my hand, and I moved on to thinking about drinking it.

In any case, this ignored premonition was of little use to us now, standing around outside the Hollywood Bowl with bags full of food and no tickets to the show. The security officer gave us a photocopy of our fake tickets and encouraged us to file a police report. She said that if this guy had ripped off enough people - and from the looks of it, he was on quite a roll - then his crime could escalate to a serious charge. Again, little solace was taken in this at this particular moment.

Luckily, I went to the box office and was able to purchase four more tickets in very similar seats in the Garden Box section, for only $25 more per ticket. Of course, this was on top of the $400 we had already flushed down the toilet. But we did get to see the show, which was great (kvetch-free!). And we do have a pretty good story.

All I know is, this asshole has some pretty intense karma coming his way. This isn't like someone breaking into your home and stealing your TV. This is: you made plans, made preparations, invited friends, got excited for something you were looking forward to, got in a car and went somewhere...only to have it all taken away from you. That's a pretty shitty thing to do to someone...let alone however many people Dickwad McMoneybags did this to.