Scalpers Triumphant!

Long-time readers of this space may recall my posts in October of 2007 about scalping, and the scandal that occurred after the company that runs the Colorado Rockies baseball team’s website was hacked during the critical few minutes after tickets went on sale, preventing any of the team’s frantic fans from purchasing tickets and ensuring that the local scalpers would make ever more of a killing than usual – because they were the only ones who could buy anything. You can revisit that post here if you want to, but a story that has popped up in New Jersey this week not only tops that old post, it leaves it in the dust…

A story being reported in the New Jersey Star-Ledger is claiming that the Ticketmaster web site was giving off an error message to anyone attempting to purchase tickets for two Bruce Springsteen concerts, allowing more than 30,000 tickets to be scooped up by scalpers who just happen to be selling all of them on a Ticketmaster subsidiary service called TicketsNow. There has been outrage in various New Jersey communities, to the extent that one of the congressmen from the state is now calling for a full-scale Federal investigation into what happened. Meanwhile, Ticketmaster is insisting that there was nothing wrong with its website, only a few people were blocked from purchasing tickets, and it has no knowledge of who all of those scalpers are, how they managed to obtain all of those tickets so quickly, or why all of them would be selling those tickets on TicketsNow for 400% and 4,000% markups…

Now, I have no evidence that there has actually been any wrongdoing in this case. It’s actually possible (however unlikely) that there was no involvement by Ticketmaster to cut themselves in for a share of the (huge!) scalper’s market for concert tickets, that the disruptions on their website were naturally occurring computer and communications errors, and that several thousand (it would be 7,500 if ticket sales were limited to the 4 that is customary for hot concert events) individual hackers are responsible for these events. I’m even willing to discuss the possibility that more than seven thousand people bought tickets for the purpose of reselling them and all decided to use the same Ticketmaster service to do so. What I am saying is that even if all of that is true, this event sets a new standard in incredibly bad public relations, and Ticketmaster should really have known better…

Will this present case result in Federal laws being passed to prohibit ticket scalping and establish fair-play requirements for selling tickets? There’s no way to be sure, but it seems clear that the point at which the public is no longer willing to just sit by and watch the scalpers walk off with ten or twenty times the face price of various tickets (preventing all but the wealthiest fans from attending) is just about upon us – and that Ticketmaster is not likely to prosper from their refusal to regulate their own business to prevent this kind of outrage. Only time will tell if such legislation will pass, or if the average fan will be any better off under the new conditions, but it’s hard to imagine how things could be much worse than a popular even selling out within 90 seconds, being unable to even log into the purchase site, and then being offered the same tickets at ten or twenty times the price…

But if anybody has any ideas, I think both Ticketmaster and the U.S. Congress have “suggestions” pages on their web sites…

Cable Story, Continued

Yesterday I began telling you the old story of the time our cable company saw its West Los Angeles system go down on Super Bowl Sunday, and the Senior Officer Present was me – because everyone senior to me was playing ostrich that day. After getting Trevor and his crew on the way out to deal with the system I cleared out our voicemail, got the incoming phone lines working, and started fielding the constant streams of irate calls that were still coming in at a rate of about 2 a minute. There were a lot of people out there looking at static, and all of them wanted somebody to yell at. At times like this, there’s really no substitute for a live voice on the line telling them that our best people are on their way to fix the system right now, and we will keep you posted…

About an hour later I got a call from Trevor, who had reached the microwave transmitter for our West L.A. system and discovered the source of the problem. As it turned out, someone had cut through the cable linking the transmitter with the Earth Station that collected the signals from the satellites in orbit and converted them back into television with a fire axe. They could tell it was a fire axe because the guy who did it was still wandering around on the roof of the building that housed the transmitter and the Earth Station control room (it was another apartment building, to which we also provided cable service) waving the axe around…

When the police were summoned and had managed to subdue the axe man, they asked him why he had cut the cable. The man replied that he was concerned that the signals from our satellite dishes would attract Flying Saucers, which would then land on top of the building and collapse the roof, killing him. If that sounds insane to you, you should know that the man with the axe didn’t even live in the building; he claimed his ex-girlfriend did, and he was worried about being crushed by UFOs at some future point after they reconciled, but no one was ever able to identify who his girlfriend was supposed to be. The policemen on the scene conceded that he might have been making that part up…

Back at headquarters, my life had dramatically improved on receiving this call. The people calling to demand updates on their cable were generally mollified when I told them that the system would be back up in time for the game, and when I explained about the lunatic with the axe a lot of them actually went from angry to sympathetic. In the cases where anyone was still peeved, I generally told them “Look, we can build you a system that’s proof against weather, equipment failure, sunspots, human error, even power outages – but there’s only so much anyone can do about idiots with axes.” Even our most irate customers generally had to agree that this was the case…

When Monday morning arrived I explained the situation to the management team of the company, and told them what I’d done about it. I couldn’t tell if the senior managers wanted to fire me for promising Trevor the $400 an hour (it wound up being about 2.5 hours total, counting travel time – the broken cable wasn’t that hard to replace), or commend me for not only handling the situation but getting a private contracting firm to show up on a Sunday. In the event, no one said anything to me about the events of the day before; they just told me to go ahead and pay the bill that had arrived for this emergency service, and went off to do whatever it was they did on weekdays…

I know; it’s not a situation that any of you are ever likely to encounter. Except for one key point: when you leave someone in charge of the company (especially when you leave them hanging like that) you are creating a policy maker, whether you want to or not. Unless you want the junior member of your management team to make decisions that could cost you a lot more than you really want to pay, answer your freaking telephone!

Flying Saucers and Basic Cable

I saw a story online yesterday about one of the cable television companies that provides service to New York City losing their feed during the Super Bowl, leaving all of their residents without any way of watching the game. You can read about the details here if you want to, but the story reminded me of one of the more outrageous stories to come out of my time in cable television…

It was Super Bowl Sunday 1993, and I was working for a small private cable company in Los Angeles, California. This entire industry is extinct in the United States, now; unable to compete with broadband and DSS systems, most of the companies that did this have gone under or evolved into something else. But back in the early 1990s there were a number of companies using alternative technologies to compete with the entrenched cable companies, and I worked for one that provided service to several large residential properties using a microwave system. On the morning of the Super Bowl 1993 I had gone to the warehouse store to pick up some munchies for the party later, when my pager went off about fifty times in less than ten minutes. A quick call to our answering service confirmed that our entire West Los Angeles system was down…

Now, you have to remember that I was not the president of the cable company; I wasn’t even one of the senior managers. In fact, whether or not I actually classed as a manager at all depended on whether the people who ran the outfit wanted me to be in charge of something – but that’s a rant for another day. For the purposes of this story, all that matters is that there were four people senior to me in the company, and not one of them was answering their home phone OR responding to their pager (this was before cell phones). Like it or not, I had just inherited the worst technical problem in the history of our company; a situation so bad that it really couldn’t be described without using the word “cluster” somewhere…

I aborted the warehouse run and scrambled for my office, where I discovered that at least 300 of our customers had called demanding to know when their cable would be repaired, at which point our voice mail had overloaded and crashed as well. I was also unable to reach any of the managers senior to me OR any of our in-house repair people, all of whom should have had their pagers on, Sunday or not. With no other choice, I called the contractor we used for heavy construction projects and repairs our in-house people didn’t have time (or the expertise) to do. Fortunately, I had their Chief Engineer’s home number…

Trevor (that was his name) didn’t really want to roll out from Diamond Bar to West L.A. on Super Bowl Sunday, and grumbled that he was going to bill us double time and a half ($100 an hour instead of the usual $40 – remember, this was 16 years ago) for the call. I reminded him that all of the people who outranked me were incommunicado, and asked if he knew what that made me. “No; what does that make you?” he replied.

“Senior Officer Present,” I told him. “The only people who can countermand this order are refusing to obey their own regulations, and have stated in writing that under these conditions I am in charge of the cable company. And I don’t care WHAT you bill us for as long as the West L.A. system is up before game time! Any questions?”

You could hear Trevor grinning. “No sir,” he replied. “We’ll get right out there, and I’ll call you when we’re onsite. All four of us, that is.”

That meant it would be $400 an hour instead of the usual $40 – and there was nothing my superiors could do about it. They could fire me (and might) but they’d lose any legal efforts to avoid paying him (that whole “customary practice” thing). I really liked working with Trevor and his boys. And what they found when they got on site convinced me that I’d made the right call…

But that’s going to have to wait for tomorrow’s post…

Let the Buyer Beware…

Last year I wrote in this space about people who are taking out auto loans large enough to cover not only the price of the new car they want to purchase, but also large enough to cover the remaining loan payments , and how unbelievably stupid I thought this was. Now, I don’t mean to offend anyone; I’m not talking about circumstances under which you really need to upgrade your vehicle and can’t afford to pay off your current loan before taking on another one. The thing is, those situations don’t happen all that often; unless your family is expecting one new baby and winds up with quintuplets or something, you’re not really all that likely to suddenly need a whole new class of personal transportation. And even then, you will probably have at least a few months warning…

The situation I just heard about is even worse, however – and in many cases, it’s not the fault of the people being screwed that their problems are happening in the first place. A story being reported this week by the Associated Press details several cases of people who purchased a new car from a dealer who promised to pay off their remaining auto loan, only to find out later that the dealer had gone out of business without making good on that promise, and that they were still on the hook for their old auto loan as well as their new one. Even worse are the cases of people who bought a trade-in car from a dealer, only to find out that the dealer had never paid off the existing auto loan and they are now on the hook for the original owner’s loan! And the worst part of all is that in most cases, there’s nothing they can do about it…

If the dealer you bought your car from has gone out of business without paying off the existing loans on the car, you can always sue them and try to collect enough out of the bankruptcy proceeding to cover your losses, but you’re probably going to be a fair ways down the list of creditors, and it’s unlikely you will recover enough to be worth the effort. Some of the states have laws on the books to prevent this – and many others, notably including California, as trying to pass them – but from the consumer’s perspective, that may just mean that your auto dealer is in prison on criminal charges as well as bankrupt. In which case, you will still have to pay for their criminal wrongdoing…

Meanwhile, state officials in California were investigating 309 cases of this fraud reported during calendar 2008 alone. Several other states (notably including Florida) also had three digits worth of cases last year, and I don’t imagine anything close to 100% of the actual events are being reported. And I don’t suppose this will end before the current financial crisis does; people who are obsessed with this sort of extreme consumerism are not likely to give it up just because there’s a chance they’ll get screwed. After all, there was a much higher probability they’d lose out in the real estate market with the sub-prime loans and predatory lenders, and that doesn’t seem to have stopped millions of people from making some really stupid choices…

In the long run, the only way to avoid this sort of issue is to pay off your entire car loan before you trade in your car. If you’re buying a used car you could always check with your state’s Department of Motor Vehicles (or equivalent) and make sure the title is clean – don’t take the dealer’s word for it; anybody willing to commit fraud is probably not going to mind committing forgery, too. And don’t assume that just because a dealer has been in business for a long time that they can’t go under in this fashion; it’s a dangerous time for anyone in business, and the old saying about “Let the buyer beware!” is more true now than it ever was…