Technology 38, Rich 0

Yet another adventure of an old man trying to deal with technology.

I buy one ticket -- yes one ticket so shut up -- to Toto/Journey Thursday night at the Summit Arena in The Monument. I purchased it through StubHub instead of the Monument box office. Big Mistake.

And yes I know that Journey is the headliner but I like Toto better. Maybe I should say I like Toto’s Steve Lukather, the only original member still going but the lead guitarist who sings a lot of their songs. He is one of my favorite performers, so I bought the ticket to see him. I'll stay for Journey, but let's just say I have "Stopped Believing." Sorry.

Back to my one ticket. It came to my Gmail account Friday. I accepted the transfer from Monument like it asked me to do.

I get an email saying the transfer is accepted and I just needed to download the ticket. I do and it's nowhere on my phone. I do it multiple times and still no ticket to scan. I tap on a little mini ticket in the file to open and it says transfer is pending. Saturday I asked a much younger friend who was actually taught something on a computer in school and he got the same results.

Still no ticket to scan.

On Monday I go to the Monument box office. They try to text and email a new transfer to me and nothing comes through. They eventually print me out a new ticket and I am good to go. They were very nice and helpful, the ladies at the Monument box office. I thought maybe I had charmed my way into them just printing me a ticket, but my brother Ralph, who works at the greeter's desk at Monument, said there had been a few others come in with online ticket problems. Likely, they printed me the ticket so I would just shut up and go away. I'll stick with the charmed theory if anybody else asks.

Wait, I'm not done. I check my phone in the parking lot and I realize I have no internet. The same happened at the dog park Sunday and Monday and other places. I go to a Verizon store down the street and the guy looks at everything and finally asks me if I had just tried restarting the phone.

"Of course I did, I'm not stupid," I blurt out. I hadn't restarted the phone but I wasn't going to admit it

He restarts the phone and about five or six texts and a voicemail from Saturday pop up as fast as I used to eat tacos on Taco Tuesday.

All is good in the world until I read a couple of those texts from my supervisor at the Mines athletics department. I figured out why he hadn't returned a couple of important texts Saturday night after I wrote my women’s basketball story. Stupid me and stupid phone.

I thought he had forgotten a couple of conversations we previously had. I wanted to watch the Hot Springs vs. Rapid City Christian boys’ basketball game Friday and about 10 days prior he said sure, we'll just switch stories -- I'll write the men's story (the game is later) and he will write the women's story. Then last Monday I realized the game was in Hot Springs, not Hart Ranch, so I said never mind, we'll stick to the normal game plan.

So when he wrote Saturday's women's story I thought he was the one who was dazed and confused. Turns out that earlier Saturday he had sent me a couple of texts saying it would work for him to write the women's story and me the men's as he had something else he needed to do later. Of course, I hadn't seen the texts and he went along with the plan as if I saw his texts but forgot to respond.

On our website I saw his women's story was ready to post and I texted him thinking he might have forgotten not only which day we were originally going to switch, but that the switch was cancelled. And of course, I didn't know he wasn't getting my texts, so seeing he wrote the women's game, I figured he wanted me to write the men's story. I went ahead and wrote the men’s story and waited and waited for his response. Finally at 11:30 p.m. I went to bed.

I got up Sunday morning and saw that he had attached a photo to my men’s story. He published both of my basketball stories and my track story (I had a busy afternoon/night).

We cleared Saturday's miscommunication up Monday afternoon via the same technology that had basically kicked my ass earlier. No harm, no foul.

From now on it's paper tickets all of the way and I plan to remind myself to "restart your phone once in awhile, stupid."

Don't hold your breath.