Click on the image for a larger one.

A Taiwanese who likes a Mexican

Aerva, the company I work for, bought some tickets to the Mexico - Brazil game at Gillette Stadium. Mexico ended up losing 3-1. Booo. We planned to have a tailgate party at 6pm and go into the stadium at 8pm for the game. We weren’t prepared for the crazy amount of traffic. The only other place I’ve seen traffic that bad was Mexico City. We left Cambridge at around 4:45 and didn’t get to the stadium until 8. The road to the stadium has 4 lanes. That’s just not enough, it’s bad planning. The road was filled with Brazilians (and some Mexicans) cheering the whole way. My girlfriend wore my Mexico t-shirt (she looked very cute in it), and the Brazilians kept jeering at her. One little Brazilian boy stuck his head out the window and waved and she shouted, “Boo! I don’t like you!” It was very funny.

We had 3 extra tickets to the game and I tried to sell them via the MIT Clubmex mailing list. Because we had to pick up the tickets at the stadium, I had arranged to meet up with those who bought them before the game. They hadn’t arrived by the time the game started, so I waited around for a bit at the gate to see if they would get there in time. I texted them constantly, and they all replied that they would arrive “in 10 minutes.” Unfortunately, they underestimated the traffic. By the end of the first half I texted them saying that if they didn’t get there before the end of half-time the tickets would be gone. One person, who asked for two tickets, decided to turn around because they were just not going to make it even by the end of the game. They were really apologetic about it, and offered to pay for the tickets anyway (I declined, I felt really bad for them).

The other person seemed to be riding on the Clubmex shuttle, and he kept telling me that he was very near (even though he was not). He finally got there with 15 minutes left in the game. At that point I was really annoyed and didn’t want to go down to the gate to give him the tickets, but Sanjay, because he’s an extremely nice guy, said that he would go to the gate. That’s when Brazil scored two goals, and Sanjay missed them. He ended up meeting the guy at the end of the game, but he didn’t care about the ticket then.

The ticket experience was really annoying - I was communicating with these people took away from watching the game. I feel really bad for Sanjay, he missed a very exciting part of the game. The problem was that this was my first experience selling tickets. The rule from now on is: if you don’t show up by game time, the tickets are gone. I felt bad for these people stuck in traffic, but I should have been stricter.

But in the end, I had a fun time, even with the traffic and the ticket issue. We had a tailgate party after the game because we didn’t want to deal with the parking lot traffic, and everyone seemed to enjoy themselves. Hopefully we’ll get to go on more company outings like this.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 13th, 2007 at 12:14 pm and is filed under Photography. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.