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So I retired at the end of twenty twenty one after spending forty some years and broadcasting and other minor jobs. I have a lot of time in my hands, so I guess it's time to live up to the old stereotype of the cranky old dude. Hey, you kids, get off my lawn. I'm jimpoling. This is my view from the middle because I'm recording this episode. I'm sixty eight years old. Okay, so actually I'll be sixty nine pretty soon. But who's counting? How on the world did I get so old so fast? I really don't feel sixty nine. I mean, look at since cancer surgery and radiation in twenty twenty three caused me to lose sixty three pounds. I scare myself when I look in the mirror and say, the skinny old dude. I still have a full head of hair, and the older ladies at church are always commenting on it. So I guess I'm fortune in that regard. My dad wasn't bald, but he did have extremely thin hair when he was my age. Anyway, before I left my job at the end of twenty twenty one, I joked that I would be headed off into the world of four PM dinner times, driving in the left lane of the Interstate at forty miles an hour with my right blinker run calling all the radio stations in the market and telling them they're doing it all wrong, and constantly yelling at the neighborhood kids to get off my lawn. Now called the radio stations thing was something I put up with from the other side to the telephone as program director of a local radio station. Seems the conversation would always start with I was in radio for blah blah years. Oh brother, here it comes following that would be a list of all the things this program director emeritus heard on the station that he just knew were wrong and that I needed to fix. Thank you for your comments, thank you for listening. Bye bye. Haven't brought myself to do that yet. And I also haven't adopted the early meal times, nor do I do the interstate thing. But my wife says I do yell at the TV a lot more than I used to. This happens most often during the evening news broadcasts. I'm either yelling about something someone did or said that I thought was stupid, or yelling about the reporter doing a stand up butchering the King's English or swallowing their words. I used to teach broadcast news delivery, so sometimes all that stuff erupts at the wrong moment. But I guess because of all the extra time in my hands, I find myself getting annoyed at the dumbest things. For instance, on TV, why does flow the progressive insurance lady, we're an apron? How messy can auto insurance really be? And why are all those people in that diabetes commercial dancing and singing? If I had diabetes, I don't think I'd be doing that? And why do tissue box makers design them so halfway through the box you can't grab just one tissue. They all come out in a clump, so they just want you to waste them so you'll buy more. And why is it every time fed chairman's erme pile sneezes, I lose a thousand bucks in my retirement account. Huh, hey, you kids, get off my lawn. I'm okay. Breathe, breathe, breathe. But sometimes cantankerousness and years of what we shall call seasoning can pay off, especially if you have the time to do it right. I mean, what else do I have to do. This became apparently I attempted to buy a Christmas gift for my wife. My wife and I like to go to the theater. In recent years, we've had season tickets to the Broadway Series at the Doctor Phillips Center for the Performing Arts in Orlando, but unimpressed with the lineup of shows for this season, we opted not to renew. But there are some shows that I thought my wife would enjoy, so I thought it would be nice to buy her some individual show tickets. One was Mama Mia. I'm not really into Mama Mia, but my wife loves abbas, so it seemed like a good idea. The other was Disney's Lion King. Both shows we had seen before, but it had been a long time, so I figured we could do them again. Now, there is a strategy and an art to buying tickets to these things. If you're not careful, you can wind up paying exorbitant fees or even getting scalped if you're not careful, so you have to do some shopping around. Also, tickets for some of these shows sell out pretty early, eight to ten months in advance, so it can be challenging to even find tickets to some of these shows, Mama Mia wasn't too hard and got those right away. Had to pay some fees, but it wasn't too bad. But the Lion King was a different story. Seems most of the shows were already sold out five months before the performances, so I made the mistake of googling around to find tickets. Oh boy, The first link to come up looked like a legitimate ticket agent website. It was a site where people who have already purchased tickets could resell them ticketcenter dot com. That's what the hyphen in between ticket and center. My advice in twenty twenty hindsight, don't go to this site. Turns out, although everything they were doing was technically legal, none of it was a good idea. But the website looked professional and legitimate at the time. The price of the tickets for Lion King was exhort orban but I kind of expected that since they were sold out everywhere else, and I resigned myself to the idea that I would be paying through the nose to get these tickets. So I went ahead and bottom. In the fine print on the site, they tell you that the ticket prices may be above or below face value. But nowhere during the purchase of the line King tickets did they show you what the actual face value of the tickets were. I didn't realize how far above face value I was paying for these things until I actually got the digital tickets, which showed the face value. Turns out I just paid almost two and a half times the face value for them. What's more, they have a strict no refund all sales are final policy. I had been schnockered in by the whole thing, and I wasn't very happy. True, I was mad at myself for not being more diligent and checking out this apparent ticket scalping site before doing business with them. Despite their so called no refund policy. I got on the site's customer service chat facility and requested a refund for the tickets. The disparity between the face value and the price I paid for the tickets. Well, you probably figured out by now what their response was, Sorry, no refunds. Then they pointed to the notice on site about the ticket prices being above face value. Well, my old retired guy cantankerousness kicked in and I was steamed. I did a little checking and in Florida it is legal. The scalp tickets on these reseller websites can't do it in person at the venue, but they can online as long as they make the no refund policy clear and clarified that the tickets are being sold by a third party. So it didn't look like I had a leg to stand on. I didn't care all you kids get off my lawn. I tried doing a chargeback on my credit card, but that was refused. In the meantime, I actually found tickets to the Lion King show at Doctor Phillips at their actual face value, so I bought them, rolling the dice that I would actually be successful in getting a refund from the scalpers. I now I was taking a chance on losing even more money in this deal. But at this point I figured, oh what the heck. I tried again on the chat facility to get them to grant me a refund. They kept touting the no refund policy and the third party seller thing, and they kept suggesting I try to sell the tickets on another reseller website. Now that last option was not something I was crazy about doing. In order to cut my losses on this, I'd have to do to someone else. What these people did to me, and I couldn't bring myself to do that. So I knew if that was the only option, I'd be losing most of what I paid for the tickets anyway, So I went on the chat facility one more time. This time I brought out the big, cantankerous old man guns. Now I learned something in years of dealing with stuff like this. If you get all emotional and become belligerent to the customer service people, it does no good. After all, most of the time the people you're dealing with are not the ones responsible for the transgressions. They're just doing their job, and they're probably being underpaid to do so. Someone told me once long ago that the technique here is to tell someone to go to hell and have them enjoy the trip. Another thing to do is to make sure that if you're putting things in writing, either via snail mail, a chat box, or an email, that you form understandable sentences with proper syntax, and for God's sake, do a spell check. Nothing says this guy's a sucker more than someone who can't form a sentence or spell properly. I used to get complaints when I worked at the radio station from people who couldn't form an intelligent sentence to save their lives, those went right into the circular file. Heck, now we have the chat GPT to help out, although I haven't really used that yet, and I didn't in this case. Anyway, I opened this last dish ever chat with a request for a full refund of the tickets. The agent on the other end did what the rest of them did, tell me about the no refund policy, the third party thing sell the tickets on a reseller site. Blah blah blah, blah blah. So I very politely said, thank you. So this is what will now happen. You have ten days in which to fulfill my request for a full refund. If after ten days that refund has not appeared on my credit card, the following actions will be taken. Number one, A letter will be sent to the Consumer Protection Division of the Florida Office of the Attorney General outlining your deceptive practices, including selling tickets at more than twice their face value without informing the customer of what the actual face value of the ticket is. Number two, A complaint with the same information will be filed with the Better Business Bureau number three through my existing contacts in the Orlando metro market that I have established in over forty years in working in the media. A complaint will be broadcast on the local ABC Cox Media television stations. You will be contacted by their investigative reporter, Jeff Diel. These reports air on the local station in Orlando and on Cox Media's eleven other television stations across the country. Please do not quote me your refund policy or the fine print on the website that states that tickets may be sold above or below face value. These are not the issues. Ticket scalping is legal in the state of Florida. However, just saying that the price may be above face value is not sufficient. You need to reveal upfront to the customer what the actual face value of the ticket is before the purchase is made. You are not doing this currently. This constitutes a deceptive business practice. Also, saying that you are not in control of what the independent sellers are doing on your site is simply not true. You control the website and can lay down requirements for sellers to abide buy. One of those requirements needs to be full disclosure of the face value of the tickets, sincerely, James E. Polling. So THERETO put that in your pipe and smoke it. Well I didn't say that, of course, but I was thinking it. But I didn't get belligerent or abusive. I didn't make unreasonable demands that I knew they couldn't fulfill, and I didn't actually threaten to do anything that I couldn't actually follow through with. After I got off the chat, I composed an email to the site's customer service department with the same exact message. How email went out on January fifteenth. The next day, January sixteenth, I get an email from ticketcenter dot COM's customer service saying that as a quote one time courtesy, they are issuing a refund. Well, of course it's a one time courtesy. I won't be doing business with them again another time when old man can tankerousness Is that actually a word? Well, anyway, when it paid off was when my wife ordered this waist high shelving unit cabinet thing from a company online called The Lakeside Collection. The description and picture on the website touted three seagrass baskets. It actually said quote includes basket set end quote and goes on to say that the baskets fit neatly into the shelves in the unit. The inset pictures showed the baskets next to the actual shelving unit. But when we got the silly thing, no baskets were to be found. We naturally thought it was just an honest mistake, so my wife called Lakeside Collection. They flat out denied that the baskets were to be included in the order, even though it was obvious in the website description that they were supposed to be included, and they suggested that we order the baskets for twenty six dollars. Huh. No amount of arguing on the phone seemed to sway them, So I get out my trusty laptop again, and here we go. In my email, I said they have ten days to fulfill the order as advertised on their site, or I would start sending letters to the Attorney General's Office, the Better Business Bureau of the Federal Trade Commission, Donald Trump, the Pope. Well, while you get the idea, I didn't really mention the Poper Trump, but I included a screenshot of their website advertisement for the shelving unit, and I circled the part or it explicitly states quote includes basket set end quote. I also pointed out that federal law prohibits this type of false advertising. Also, I said, it's a twenty six dollars issue for them versus the potential of thousands of dollars in fines and loss of business as a result of the letters I would be writing, costing me only three postage stamps. Again, I was very matter of fact about the whole thing and didn't act belligment or unreasonable. Get off my lawn. A couple of days later, I received an email from Lakeside Collection apologizing up and down for the mistake and for not resolving the issue over the phone. They sent us the baskets free of charge and free of shipping charges. So there I was in the middle a ticket scuping site digging in their heels and refusing me a refund on the theater tickets priced two and a half times their face value, and the potential of losing a lot of money for a stupid mistake, a company making obviously false advertising claims on their website and refusing to make good on them, and us on the other side not holding the baskets that they promised that last one was more of the principle of the thing than anything else. Cantankerousness can actually pay off sometimes. So I've said it before and I'll say it again. All you kids, get off my lawn. I'm jimpolling and that's my view from the Middle. In the next episode, how far back in your head can you roll your eyes? Dadisms? Let the I rolling begin next on My View from the Middle. Have a story to tell about being in the middle, let us know. Email Jim at my View from the Middle dot com. That's Jim at my View from the Middle dot com.