Yesterday I bought a couple of tickets for one of the concerts at this autumn's local music festival. Or perhaps I didn't, I'm not sure. Their brochure arrived in the post, and leafing through it there were a few things I quite liked the sound of. A quartet playing Haydn and Beethoven on gut strings would have been nice, but clashed with the monthly beekeeping meeting, and I would definitely have gone for the Goldberg variations transcribed for string trio if I could just have had the music and not the associated lunch. I have seen the room where the lunch is being held, and it is not very big, leading me to darkly suspect it would be laid for tables of eight or ten and I would be expected to make painful conversation with strangers through two courses while paying approximately twenty quid for the privilege.
The friend I was hoping to go with felt the same about the lunch, and we opted for the Sacconi Quartet performing Nielsen and Sibelius, taking pot luck with the world premiere of a new piece of music by somebody we'd not heard of. On the whole I am a hopeless reactionary and the string quartet repertoire and I part company at about the beginning of the twentieth century, not rejoining forces again until Philip Glass.
Although they sent me a smart printed brochure that must have cost a fair bit to produce and might be one reason why their ticket prices are on the steep side, the music festival does have a website. I am all in favour of being able to buy tickets online, especially if I'm going with somebody else. Agree what you want to go to, book the tickets the same day, get the date in the both diaries, bosh. All done and dusted. Sending off an application form and a cheque and then waiting for weeks to see what you've got, and fiddling round with refund cheques or maybe finding the person you thought you were going with has forgotten or given up and booked something else for that evening is enough to turn the concert going process into hard work.
After I'd selected two tickets for the chosen concert and typed my Paypal login code when prompted without really thinking, I began to think that was weird when Paypal said that my account had been debited for £36 and the vendor would send me my tickets, because I was sure I hadn't yet input my name or address. I looked again at the smart brochure, and saw that while booking for Friends opened at the start of June, general booking didn't begin until the third week of June and would be taken in order of application. I certainly hadn't paid to become a Friend, I only wanted to go to one concert. So had I bought tickets at all when the booking period hadn't officially opened yet, and if not why had they charged me? I wasn't going to get anywhere ringing them on a Sunday, so I emailed my friend to warn her that I might have been jumping the gun when I said I'd got tickets, and if she could pencil the date in I'd let her know one way or the other as soon as possible. Then I emailed the music festival asking whether I had in fact got tickets, and how would they know where to send them?
This morning once it was office hours I rang the music festival and spoke to someone rather posh and quite deaf, who explained that she had only just got back and couldn't really help me because nowadays she left the organisation to the young people. Lots of emails had come in from Paypal over the weekend, and somebody called Lindsay who wasn't there at the moment would go through them in due course but didn't have time to reply to each one. She could see my name on the list and thought that meant I had got tickets, but became distracted by the fact that my baptismal name as it appears on financial accounts is not the same as my everyday name as it appears on my email address. I did my best to explain that state of affairs using the Catherine Middleton versus Kate Middleton analogy, and she brightened up and said that she was sure that it would be All Right. Lindsay would reply to me, maybe in the next couple of weeks, and in the meantime if I had any worries I was welcome to ring the box office again, or write to them. Would I like to become a Friend?
I grumbled about the whole unsatisfactory process to the Systems Administrator, who made a career out of understanding more about how money moves about and how to keep track of it than most people. It used to be all in a day's work for the SA to get home late because two hundred and fifty million had gone missing somewhere in the international clearance system and the SA's team had been trying to track it down, so a stray thirty-six quid was small fry. The SA said it was obvious that the music festival didn't have an online booking system as such, and must be using Paypal to accept ticket payments as if they were donations, then matching them up manually to emails. That sounds to me like a recipe for financial chaos, given the number of concerts they now put on. I have a very unusual name and I only want two tickets to one concert. I am sure that the festival organisers are entirely honest and I am confident that I'll either get two tickets in due course, or else a refund eventually. But given the number of concerts and the amount of other people's money they'll be handling I do think they need a better system.
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