STEPgate, Revisited

I’ve had some correspondence with a good friend who is a long-time season ticket holder, who upgraded to Mount Nittany Club seats when they first became available. He, like many other old timers, is thoroughly pissed off about the Penn State’s Athletic Department’s Beaver Stadium football season ticket extortion, announced on Tuesday as the STEP program. (Stands for Stick it To Established Patrons.)

My friend, whom I shall call Toe Jam, relates a story about his initial experience as a club seat holder, as he wonders how all this STEPgate stuff will play out. I’ll change the names to protect the innocent.

“I want to watch as they try to move people around.  The first game of 2010 should be interesting.  I may go just to watch the fights.  Why I say this is because of my experience at the first game with the Club Seats.  Mrs. Jam, her God Daughter, and I selected the seats we had at the previous Blue-White Game that April.  So we knew exactly where we were going to sit, and did not have to look at the ticket to find our section, row and seat number.  We went right to those seats.

“We were there a short while and some good feeling fuck from the ‘Development Office,’ a pseudonym for the beggar’s office, told us we were in the wrong seats and that that entire row was not assigned and he had an ‘important’ group of folks (whales) coming in — I guess I as a paying fan was not impotent.  Anyway, I looked at our tickets and saw that we were to be sitting elsewhere, I don’t remember exactly where.  We had to get a hold of Jim Meister, Bob White’s predecessor, to get thing’s squared away.

“The point is that if they could not assign new fans to new seats, how will they move people from one seat to another while moving someone into the now vacant seat, assuming the seat being moved has been vacated.  Well you know what I mean.  I guess they will call on the Math department and apply queuing theory.  Or better yet, call that professor on Numb3rs.”

(I was thinking more in terms of quantum physics — you know, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle?) Yeah, it should be interesting. This is just the beginning of the outrage that will come to be known as STEPgate (at least in this Turkey’s blog).