Don't bother waiting out overnight to try to get good seats for the Badger football game against Illinois this week. You think you can wait outside for a night and get section P row 15? Guess again. Matt Bernstein is more likely to go to a pig roast on Yom Kippur.
\A bunch of fraternities and sororities got together and just had a couple people waiting and yet they had like 600 tickets,"" UW junior Mac Machut told me Monday. Machut's voucher was in with a dedicated group that waited outside the Kohl Center beginning Saturday night, four days before the ticket exchange. Despite being nearly at the front of the exchange line, Machut's group ended up exchanging its 20 vouchers for seats in section N, row 14. The other options for the group, Machut said, were P 60 and O 50.
A couple people holding 600-some vouchers? And it matters little if it's not actually 600-would 300 be any different? What is important is the athletic department's football voucher exchange system is failing. Lazy football fans are cheating the system by cutting in the front of the line at the last moment, screwing over the truly dedicated fans that willingly wait for days to try to get prime tickets.
On each voucher it states, ""Tickets will be issued on a first-come, first-serve basis."" Cutting in line when the exchange begins, while other students have waited outside overnight is a gross abuse of the concept of ""first-come."" Sure the one guy is there first-maybe he has even been rotating with a couple other people-but he should just be allowed to get the maximum 24 tickets, not upwards of 24 rows by letting every person wearing Greek letters take the alpha spots in line.
My seat location has gotten progressively worse each game despite efforts by my group of friends to get in line earlier and earlier. For Penn State, my friends waited overnight. Yet when I got to the ticket window, section P was gone and the lowest seats available in sections N and O were each row 66, three rows from the top.
Camping out overnight and not getting section P-hell, if I had been a few more people down the line I wouldn't have even gotten N or O either-for Penn State? Are you kidding me? They went 3-9 last year. This was not by any stretch of the imagination a ""big game,"" aside from the late-afternoon kickoff allowing the students a solid afternoon of drinking beforehand.
So what's the solution to stopping line-jumping? Maybe we need a take-a-number machine and a giant ""now serving"" board-think Department of Motor Vehicles-style-plus someone to guard the machine. How about Erasmus James, is he available? Try to get past him to take a couple extra numbers and wham! Concussion.
While Erasmus might not be so agreeable to this idea, surely someone out there has suggestions for improvement. We're all intelligent kids here. E-mail me your ideas, and if there are enough creative responses, I will print them next week.
For the past season-and-a-half, my upperclassman status has allowed me to enjoy standing in section P and joyously proclaim that O sucks. But O doesn't suck nearly as much as those of you in the first 24 rows of the section I used to be in. I thought cheaters never prospered. But they sure are a lot closer to Bucky.
Send your thoughts on line-jumping to mtworringer@wisc.edu.
