In the past, I’ve shared some of the crazy things that my friends do, but this may top them all.
For reasons that will become very obvious, I will not identify my friend, but I can tell you that she was a member of the Marysville High School class of 1964. Now that you know that, you would certainly think that over all these years she’s been alive, she would have used better sense in what she did. Actually, she’s such a smart, savvy person, I never would have expected this of her.
Let’s take this story back a bit to my friend and her husband purchasing tickets for the Ohio State-Nebraska football game. Let’s just say that Ohio State tickets are not cheap. They are very valuable, and this particular game was to be a big one. Of course, it turned out to be a wonderful win for OSU. They had been to the previous OSU home football game and enjoyed it so much that they wanted to go again.
But just a few days before the event, they realized they could not go to the game and so they sold them to their friends. So now, three owners later they were sold to two people who were actually going to be able to go to the game. This fact will become important later. Are you still with me?
Here’s where the story begins. As my friend walked through the room in her house, she saw the OSU tickets on the table. Oh, she must have thought, those must be the tickets that we had from the prior game. We aren’t going to need those anymore, so why are these still lying around? (I’m trying to get into her mind here and rationalize what she did.) With that, she decided to tear them up. It was a whim, I guess. She tore them up and threw them in the trash. Are you starting to see what might’ve happened here?
That’s where the bad part of the story begins. Just a few hours later, her husband was wondering where the Nebraska tickets were because remember, he had sold them to his friend. He thought he left them laying right there on the table. The two of them looked everywhere and suddenly it occurred to her that maybe she had torn up the wrong ones.
Then they remembered that trash day had been the day before. Oh my gosh, did they go out with the trash? No, they had been thrown away just after that. What luck. They were still in the house. A lot had to go right here to make those tickets reappear. Soon they were located in the trash – each in many pieces. The question from her husband (and actually from others) was, why did you tear them up? Why didn’t you just throw them in the trashcan? My friend has no real good answer for that.
Fortunately for her, she’s a quick thinker and saw a phone number on the ticket, and called the Ohio State ticket office. She explained what had happened. She said that she had not damaged the barcode, but that didn’t matter. The tickets had to be all in one piece. The man on the phone told her the tickets could be replaced if the person who originally bought them from the university would make the request for new ones.
Now the story gets even more interesting, since the person they were purchased from was not the original purchaser of the tickets. They located the original buyer and my friend contacted him and asked for his help. At this point, my friend realized things were going right for her, because this buyer and his wife had recently returned from a vacation. If they had been out of town, all bets were off!
Fortunately they were home and the buyer, being the nice person he is, was willing to help. So my friend’s husband and the original purchaser of the tickets, who didn’t even know each other, drove to the university ticket office at the Schottenstein Center to get new tickets.
Once there, the original ticket purchaser showed proof of purchase and within just a few minutes, the new tickets were printed. The people at the ticket office actually said this happens all the time. Really?
Whew, my friend breathed a sigh of relief. Her husband returned with the tickets, and was no longer mildly agitated. He went on to sell them to his friend. No money was made during the four exchanges of these tickets. They were only sold for face value.
What a crazy round of events! There was lots of stress, but you know what they say – all’s well that ends well. And my friend and her husband are again on the plus side of their relationship! The moral of the story – read the tickets before tearing them up and throwing them away!
(Melanie Behrens- melb@marysvillejt.com)