Last Tuesday, I went to the Taylor Swift concert.
It wasn’t easy.
Back in December when they went on sale, I volunteered to buy the tickets for our group of Swifties. I thought it would be a simple matter of logging onto Ticketmaster, picking out seats, entering a credit card number, and printing out tickets.
Oh, how wrong I was.
One does not just purchase tickets for Queen Tay.
Back in November, I bought Taylor’s new cd, Reputation. Inside, the cd informed me that I could use the specific code included to sign up for a Reputation Tour account to secure my place in line before the tickets went on sale.
Back when I first started buying concert tickets, getting a spot in line meant lining up at the physical Ticketmaster location the night before and literally camping out.
But this is 2018. So getting in line involves a smartphone.
Because I did not want a nose bleed from sitting in the back row of Heinz Field, I played along. Buying the cd earned me points. So did following Taylor on Twitter and Instagram. I even bought an official Reputation t-shirt off the website. All of these points boosted my place in line.
When the tickets finally went on sale, I had my spot and ended up with prime pickings in the “cheap” seats section.
And that’s where things got interesting.
Ticketmaster informed me there would be no paper tickets. They wouldn’t mail them to me, I couldn’t pick them up anywhere, and I couldn’t print them out.
Taylor was going mobile and so was I.
Reader, my tickets were on my smartphone.
I’m a smartphone-skeptic. I have one, and I use it, but still with some reluctance. I was one of the last people I knew to give up my dumb-phone with a slide-out keyboard, and I miss that thing every time I text. I don’t do my banking on my phone, or use it to pay for things, and I can’t quite figure out how to use Target’s Cartwheel even though everyone promises me it is super simple.
But like it or not, my group of Swifties was counting on me to get them into Heinz Field with nothing but my phone.
A month before the concert, paranoia set in. What if so many people were trying to download their tickets at one time that I couldn’t get through? What if I’d used up all the juice on my data plan?
Two weeks before the concert I made my preparations. I downloaded the tickets into the Ticketmaster App (which I had to download). I also downloaded them into my phone’s “virtual wallet,” though I had been previously unaware my phone had a wallet.
One week before Ticketmaster began sending me menacing e-mails like the one below:
Of course I didn’t want to be the fan that holds up the line! I began having nightmares that I was that fan. In my dreams, I walked up to the ticket-taker and my phone’s battery had died. Or the Ticketmaster app was gone. Or some virtual pickpocket had stolen my virtual wallet.
Three days before I took screen shots of the tickets as an extra precaution and stopped sleeping.
Then, on Tuesday night, my moment arrived. Sleep-deprived, nerves frayed, and sweating profusely, I boldly walked up to the ticket-taker. I had the tickets downloaded in three places. I pulled up the first ticket, and she scanned it with her magic wand. It worked.
Three more ticket swipes and we were in!
I nearly dropped to the floor in sheer relief. We weren’t going to be shut out of the Reputation tour because of my ineptitude.
And the show?
Completely worth the months of anxiety. Taylor delivered.
But next time, can you please just let me print out my tickets?