The Good Guys

For the second time in my life, I have gotten last minute concert tickets for a sold out rock show... at face value. It's so good to see that there is some hope for humanity on Planet Erff. Ticket scalping makes a Robeast angry.

About 60 dog years ago, Mr. Bungle was touring with The Dillinger Escape Plan. My buddy Ryborg was three degrees of separation away from Mr. Bungle and managed to score a couple guest list spots to the show in Boston. We headed out to Massachusetts, but quickly realized that there were 3 of us who wanted those 2 free slots. We attempted to scam the dude working the door "Oh, it's plus one? It's supposed to be plus two. Are you sure it just says 'two' and not 'plus two'? I'm going to give _____ a call and see if he can straighten this out."
Of course, Dude wasn't falling for it since we had no DSL's to offer. So we just started walking up the street trying to see if anyone had just one, single extra ticket.

At the end of the block, we managed to find a Bungle fan who had that one, magical extra ticket. Since there were three of us, and two of us weren't even paying in the first place, we prepared to split the cost of one arm and two legs. "How much do you want for it?" Bungle Fan looks down at the ticket and reports, "The ticket says $19.50. So, how about $19.50?" We give him the first twenty we can find and he actually starts pulling out quarters to give back to us! (No, we didn't accept the change.)

It was then that I decided that I will never in my life sell a ticket for more than face value. Some people may call Bungle Fan a sucker. If you do, you're a fuckwad in my book. You're other things elsewhere on that page in my book too: fuckface, fucknut, fuckbag, fuckpants, fucknose, fuckhole, and fucktard. It's so easy to just pick up tickets for a band you don't care about and make money off of them and the fans that love them. What work did you do for that? You logged in to Ticketbastard's pre-sale website faster? So fucking what. You don't deserve a paycheck for that. If you think we're hypocrites for having free tickets in the first place, I'll have you know that we all bought the California Butterfly t-shirts inside (and 60 dog years later, the logos are practically gone, but that's beside the point).

That show would have been the first time seeing the Dillinger Escape Plan, but something went wrong and they couldn't play. Mr. Bungle ended up playing an extra long set instead. Fast forward to last week and another Dillinger Escape Plan show... fucking sold out again! This time it was Killswitch Engage's fault, who I don't even care for, but they were headliners nonetheless. I was dumbfounded when I saw there were no tickets left, so I started scouring the I-nuts. Craigslist... scumbags asking for $200 for a pair of what used to be $26 tickets. Fuck that. There were actually people offering up that bounty as well which doesn't help the situation. Ebay's only ticket auction quickly jumped up past $100 in the first couple minutes it was live. Who knows how high those went?

Finally, I found a fellow fan on a DEP message board that had a pair of tickets, but realized he wasn't going to be able to drive down to the show in time. Coincidentally, it's another guy from Massachusetts (I guess the Masshole myth doesn't hold much water after all). He gave me the face value price, plus the cost of overnight shipping, and even offered to pay half the shipping cost! I could not believe it. Here is a guy who could have easily went on Craigslist and made $150, but instead decided to be honest and law-abiding.

Sorry to be all self-righteous on a Monday afternoon. Think of it as just being really late for church. Bitches.