(And in case anyone thinks I'm just bumbling at this, I sell online services for a living. This is my field.)

Meanwhile, all of the good seats were disappearing.

I called the 800 number. The guy on the phone asked me FOUR TIMES in the first 2 or 3 minutes what event I wanted tickets for. He spent about 10 minutes on the phone with me, sort of, but was mostly talking in Spanish and laughing with the other Spanish-speaking guys around him. I could hear everything. He put me on hold 7 or 8 times, the last time for around 15 minutes.

I have to assume tickets kept disappearing all this time, but since I couldn't actually talk to anyone or get through the web site, there was no way to know.

I finally got the tickets - barely -- not on the floor like I wanted and should have been able to buy earlier in the day, but in the back reaches of the arena. He then tried to tack on all kinds of charges, refused to ship to my office (to keep the Christmas gift secret), and said the only way to keep from ruining the surprise was to pay $2.50 to get them by email instead of by mail. That's what I did.

I have never seen such incompetence, both technically and from a service standpoint. Astonishing.

As I said, I sell an online registration system that is often used for online ticket sales. I know how this works. I also know that, in addition to the $10+ service charge they add on, they get a hefty cut of the ticket sales price.

One event I know well had $30 tickets. Ticketmaster added a $4 charge, making the ticket $34, but what buyers didn't know (but I knew) was that Ticketmaster was also getting $6 of the $30, for a total of $10 per ticket. And these were general admission, festival seating tickets. No seat numbers.

If I treated my customers with this kind of distain and was this inept in my business, I would have to close the doors next week. Any normal business would.

My new business plan is to develop a possibly illegal monopolistic stranglehold on key market segments and pay for a few elections. It might work.