I had planned on writing a “happy new” blog post to get the year off to the right start but thanks to EQ Tickets and the people behind the organizing of AFCON (African Cup of Nations 2013) tickets, I am not a very happy chappy at the moment.
In my possession at this moment in time are double tickets that I have purchased for the AFCON Final, one group game, and one quarterfinal match. One thing, however, is missing (no, not a glass of Bell’s whiskey).
What’s missing is a pair of tickets that I waited in line for two days in a row and handed over R230 for the AFCON 2013 opening game on the 19th of January.
Apparently, my cellphone number is not loaded on the system for those tickets. I can confirm this because I watched the process as the friendly Spar lady worked her magic on the computer, inputting my cell phone details and then following up with my ID number. The process ended with ID number NOT matching with the reference number I had given (yes, the same reference number I see on my receipt and the same reference number I see on the text message received from the AFCON 2013 ticket organization).
After trying endlessly and even trying to substitute a “4” on my ID with “6” – hoping that maybe somebody put in the wrong details – nothing worked.
At that moment I was getting extremely irritated at the fact that a process that should have taken no more than a few minutes, now had me repeatedly telling the Spar lady my ID number and cell number and repeatedly ending up being unsuccessful in obtaining the match tickets for which I have already paid for into my hands. To rub salt into the wound, I was probably one of the first people to purchase tickets as I paid for these items on the 27th September 2012 (see picture below for confirmation).
By the way, I only purchased my tickets on the second day after tickets officially went on sale purely because the system “jammed” on the first day as we the supporters stood in line for hours for no ultimate gain.
Anyways, back to the story, I then proceeded to call the EQ Tickets AFCON 2013 call centre – I saw this number on the largely useless (to fans who run into trouble) EQ Tickets website. I unfortunately ran out of the remaining airtime credit I had before somebody at EQ Tickts could answer. I wasted money simply holding, and holding, and holding and… well, you get the point by now.
I then purchased R29 airtime, specifically to deal with this problem at hand. I was kept holding for quite a long time and eventually when somebody answered; unfortunately for me, the man on the other side could not hear me, at all. So, I called yet again and was kept holding until the little remaining airtime was done. (Time really flies when you’re angry!)
At this point, the anger inside of me was boiling over as I had gone through a series of activities that ended up wasting my time, money, and effort, all in vain, in the hope of simply obtaining information on AFCON tickets that I paid my hard-earned money for.
I then bought R110 worth of airtime (Spar must be rolling in the money if this is happening nationwide). Yet again, I was kept holding for quite a while but this time somebody finally answered, a lady by the name of Vanessa. She sounded friendly as I told her my sad story; I gave her my ID number to check for my tickets on the system, and to my shock, she said the system only has six tickets under that specific ID number (double tickets to the three matches specified earlier). I thought to myself, “Maybe that lady at Spar did not enter my ID number correctly. She then checked the system for tickets under my cell phone number, and inexplicably, she still only saw SIX tickets registered under my cell phone number. This made absolutely no sense to me at that moment. There is no logical way to explain how this can happen.
Think about this: If I only bought six tickets according to EQ Tickets, then why did I get a reference number sent to my cell phone number? This is the exact same reference number printed on my receipt dated 27 September 2012? How is it that I bought all of my tickets from the same Spar store, on the same day, with (obviously) the same ID number, and same cell number yet two tickets somehow don’t appear under my name?
Vanessa proceeded to tell me that she will contact her supervisor about this “weird” situation and that I should expect a call from her supervisor. She could not specify to me how long I would have to wait for this phone call after I asked her for his information. At the moment, the wait continues.
As I write this piece, it has been more than 48 hours since my incident and since I spent over R100 calling EQ tickets. The supervisor that “Vanessa” said would contact me, well, simply hasn’t. After waiting for more than 24 hours for this call from the mysterious supervisor, I decided to send EQ Tickets an email to the address shown on my receipt . I am yet to receive a reply or at the very least some sort of acknowledgment of my complaint.
I have also persistently used social networks to get in contact with anybody who might be connected in anyway to the powers that be at EQ tickets (thank you to the tweeps who also helped out, special mention to @sangxa and @Blackbucs). I tagged people such as @Eqtickets_store (Eqtickets_concept), @NativeRhythms, (Sipho Sithole), and @eQTickets (EQTickets who as I type have a whopping 27 followers). I also tagged @robmarawa (award-winning radio and TV personality Robert Marawa) in some of my complaints so that these issues could be discussed on air on his radio show.
The less said about the 45 minutes of the show that I managed to listen to later that day (7 January), the better. The best part least frustrating part of the interview was when the interviewee replied to a question with the words, “I dont know the answer to that.” That at least made sense, unlike the finger-pointing session that laid blame onto government and even CAF for, ahem, under-performance in certain areas. I also did not hear any reasonable justification from the interviewee for using EQ tickets and the less-accessible “selected” Spar stores.
So two days after my unsuccessful mission to My Spar I returned yet again on the 9th of January – ten days before kickoff (somebody say Ayoba!) – foolishly hoping that my tickets would magically reappear on the system under my ID number. How foolish of me. The situation remained the same. I actually even ran into somebody else experiencing the exact same problem. This man even claims that he contacted the call centre and they assured him that the problem had been fixed after he had previously tried to collect his tickets a few days earlier without success.
Needless to say, I was not feeling so “super” as I left this Spar store.
One hopes that the best is yet to come.
Thomas Monyepao
Do follow me on twitter for more football talk and please be aware my latest blogs will appear here from now on.
In my possession at this moment in time are double tickets that I have purchased for the AFCON Final, one group game, and one quarterfinal match. One thing, however, is missing (no, not a glass of Bell’s whiskey).
What’s missing is a pair of tickets that I waited in line for two days in a row and handed over R230 for the AFCON 2013 opening game on the 19th of January.
Apparently, my cellphone number is not loaded on the system for those tickets. I can confirm this because I watched the process as the friendly Spar lady worked her magic on the computer, inputting my cell phone details and then following up with my ID number. The process ended with ID number NOT matching with the reference number I had given (yes, the same reference number I see on my receipt and the same reference number I see on the text message received from the AFCON 2013 ticket organization).
After trying endlessly and even trying to substitute a “4” on my ID with “6” – hoping that maybe somebody put in the wrong details – nothing worked.
At that moment I was getting extremely irritated at the fact that a process that should have taken no more than a few minutes, now had me repeatedly telling the Spar lady my ID number and cell number and repeatedly ending up being unsuccessful in obtaining the match tickets for which I have already paid for into my hands. To rub salt into the wound, I was probably one of the first people to purchase tickets as I paid for these items on the 27th September 2012 (see picture below for confirmation).
By the way, I only purchased my tickets on the second day after tickets officially went on sale purely because the system “jammed” on the first day as we the supporters stood in line for hours for no ultimate gain.
Anyways, back to the story, I then proceeded to call the EQ Tickets AFCON 2013 call centre – I saw this number on the largely useless (to fans who run into trouble) EQ Tickets website. I unfortunately ran out of the remaining airtime credit I had before somebody at EQ Tickts could answer. I wasted money simply holding, and holding, and holding and… well, you get the point by now.
I then purchased R29 airtime, specifically to deal with this problem at hand. I was kept holding for quite a long time and eventually when somebody answered; unfortunately for me, the man on the other side could not hear me, at all. So, I called yet again and was kept holding until the little remaining airtime was done. (Time really flies when you’re angry!)
At this point, the anger inside of me was boiling over as I had gone through a series of activities that ended up wasting my time, money, and effort, all in vain, in the hope of simply obtaining information on AFCON tickets that I paid my hard-earned money for.
I then bought R110 worth of airtime (Spar must be rolling in the money if this is happening nationwide). Yet again, I was kept holding for quite a while but this time somebody finally answered, a lady by the name of Vanessa. She sounded friendly as I told her my sad story; I gave her my ID number to check for my tickets on the system, and to my shock, she said the system only has six tickets under that specific ID number (double tickets to the three matches specified earlier). I thought to myself, “Maybe that lady at Spar did not enter my ID number correctly. She then checked the system for tickets under my cell phone number, and inexplicably, she still only saw SIX tickets registered under my cell phone number. This made absolutely no sense to me at that moment. There is no logical way to explain how this can happen.
Think about this: If I only bought six tickets according to EQ Tickets, then why did I get a reference number sent to my cell phone number? This is the exact same reference number printed on my receipt dated 27 September 2012? How is it that I bought all of my tickets from the same Spar store, on the same day, with (obviously) the same ID number, and same cell number yet two tickets somehow don’t appear under my name?
Vanessa proceeded to tell me that she will contact her supervisor about this “weird” situation and that I should expect a call from her supervisor. She could not specify to me how long I would have to wait for this phone call after I asked her for his information. At the moment, the wait continues.
As I write this piece, it has been more than 48 hours since my incident and since I spent over R100 calling EQ tickets. The supervisor that “Vanessa” said would contact me, well, simply hasn’t. After waiting for more than 24 hours for this call from the mysterious supervisor, I decided to send EQ Tickets an email to the address shown on my receipt . I am yet to receive a reply or at the very least some sort of acknowledgment of my complaint.
I have also persistently used social networks to get in contact with anybody who might be connected in anyway to the powers that be at EQ tickets (thank you to the tweeps who also helped out, special mention to @sangxa and @Blackbucs). I tagged people such as @Eqtickets_store (Eqtickets_concept), @NativeRhythms, (Sipho Sithole), and @eQTickets (EQTickets who as I type have a whopping 27 followers). I also tagged @robmarawa (award-winning radio and TV personality Robert Marawa) in some of my complaints so that these issues could be discussed on air on his radio show.
The less said about the 45 minutes of the show that I managed to listen to later that day (7 January), the better. The best part least frustrating part of the interview was when the interviewee replied to a question with the words, “I dont know the answer to that.” That at least made sense, unlike the finger-pointing session that laid blame onto government and even CAF for, ahem, under-performance in certain areas. I also did not hear any reasonable justification from the interviewee for using EQ tickets and the less-accessible “selected” Spar stores.
So two days after my unsuccessful mission to My Spar I returned yet again on the 9th of January – ten days before kickoff (somebody say Ayoba!) – foolishly hoping that my tickets would magically reappear on the system under my ID number. How foolish of me. The situation remained the same. I actually even ran into somebody else experiencing the exact same problem. This man even claims that he contacted the call centre and they assured him that the problem had been fixed after he had previously tried to collect his tickets a few days earlier without success.
Needless to say, I was not feeling so “super” as I left this Spar store.
One hopes that the best is yet to come.
Thomas Monyepao
Do follow me on twitter for more football talk and please be aware my latest blogs will appear here from now on.
