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he'd give us hundreds of dollars -- sometimes a thousand -- in cash, and we'd fan out to remote ticket outlets and sleep on the pavement to be first in line when they opened. he had specific sections he wanted -- main floor if it was a concert, courtside if it was a game, and so on. i'll never forget how strangely disappointed with me this one guy was, a genuine fan who was also sleeping outside to get rolling stone tickets, to sort of discover the next morning (when i started peeling off hundreds and asking about blocks of seats) that i probably wasn't a fan like he was.
the scalper i worked for was sleazy, sure, but he paid us several hundred dollars per gig and there was a kind of honor about the thing -- i mean, we had to physically be out there in the cold, waiting -- if not honesty. any fan who wanted to could and did sleep out there, too, waiting. it's not something i'm terribly proud of, and i didn't do it for long, although it makes a good story. but -- this whole thing with computers hacking into systems and tricking ticketmaster takes the weaseliness of scalping to a whole new level.
the computer thing ought to and probably can be fixed somehow, but scalpers will always find a way to eat up any number of tickets to giant events like this. it's probably been happening since ancient rome, when some senator sold seats in his private section to rich merchants who wanted to see the christians get eaten.
