Derby Day

When most people think of Derby Day, they think of horses, funny hats, mint juleps, and 8 hours of coverage for an event that last about 2 minutes. For me, Derby Day makes me think of well, horses, yes, but also rednecks, fair food, and a year's build up to something that has to be anti-climactic 90% of the time*. Basically, it's the Redneck Super Bowl.

I work at a couple of fairs in the late summer/early fall. The first of these is the Hopkinton State Fair, over Labor Day weekend. I don't work for the fair itself, but for a contractor that does work for the fair. I provide tech support for the ticket-selling system. I spend 8-9 days at the fairs, surrounded by fair-folk, fair-food, and fair-events. Over the course of the weekend, I try to wander through most of the exhibits, take in some of the animal shows/demonstrations, and just see the entire fair. I didn't grow up in the city, but I might as well have. There was a dairy farm next door to one of my childhood homes, but that's as close as I've ever gotten to working on a farm. So, it is interesting to me to see these kids and families, raising animals from birth, grooming them, tending to them, farming with them. Plus, my first year here, four years ago, was the first time I'd seen a goat up close and personal.

Goats have weird eyes.

At night, Hopkinton has specialy-ticketed events in their grandstands. While the events on some nights vary from year-to-year, Saturday and Sunday are reserved for demolition derbies. Sunday it's the smaller cars, 4-cylinder engines, front-wheel drive. They're apparently fun, but the Main Event for the weekend is the 6- and 8-cylinder cars, the big boys, the Saturday Night Demolition Derby. Event starts at 6:30, grandstand gates open at 5:30, people will start lining up between noon and 2:00 to get the "best" seats.

This is the event of the year in these parts. When we have pre-sale days, people show up at 7am and wait in line until 2pm to get Derby tickets. Hearing stories that these people tell to the sellers (because many of the sellers are local, and many of the customers are regulars, everyone seems to know each other), many of them set aside money over the course of the year to come to The Derby. Others, simply do without something for the next month. The Derby is $8/person. For a family of 5, that's $40, which doesn't seem like much, but that's on top of admission. Admission is anywhere from $30-$50, depending on how many children are in that family.

So, you're talking about $70-$90 dollars, just to get into the fair and the event. Parking isn't free. Food and rides and souvenirs are not free. One day at the fair with your family could cost you upwards of $200! That's not pocket change!

This is just looking at a small family. We see orders of 10 tickets, or more, just for the Derby. When ordering online, that can be over a hundred dollars, easily. Of course, when you order online, you can pay with a credit card, making it much easier to fork over a couple hundred dollars than if you came to the Fair to buy the tickets, as the Fair only takes cash (Yes, Visa and Mastercard, you can crow that The Hopkinton State Fair doesn't take American Express, but they also don't take Visa and Mastercard, either).

The other reason Derby-goers prefer to buy online is because the Derby is the one and only event at the Fair that will sell out. And not even, "There are only a handful of tickets left, let's just count the drivers as attendees, and we'll have a full 5,000." No, this is a full 5,000 tickets sold, and usually by mid-day on Saturday. So, the best way to guarantee you have a ticket is to buy in advance. If you can't get to the fairgrounds early (or if they decide not to do advanced sales in a given year), you have to order online. It's great! You order from the comfort of your home. You put it on your credit card. You get a confirmation number, and you head to The Fair, comfortable in the knowledge that you can take your time getting there, because your tickets are secure.

Unless something goes wrong.

And things go wrong. Boy, do they go wrong.

This is why I am here though, to deal with the things that go wrong. I'm on the grounds from before the gates open until after the last seller is pulled, phone in hand, waiting for one of the gates to call and say those 5 little Lovell-esque words, "Matt, I've got a problem." Then, I rush over to the gate, weaving and wedding my way through the crowds to get to the problem gate as soon as possible. If I'm lucky, the seller has solved the problem while I was on my way, or it's something simple, and easily resolved.

Many times though, something has gone wrong. Terribly wrong. The order cannot be found. These are the calls that I wake up dreading on Saturday morning. They are coming. Every year, I hope that I don't get any, but to no avail. I can't tell you the actual number, but some pretty high percentage of all online orders are for The Derby, so, when a call comes in that they can't find an order, I can usually assume it involves Derby tickets, and I race to the gate, hoping that I will get lucky and find what the seller could not.

I do have more robust search tools at my disposal than the sellers, so that helps, but sometimes, there is nothing I can do, and I have to inform the eager fair-goer that they do not have Derby tickets, and as the day grows later (or if they didn't bring cash), that they will not be able to go.**

Why does this happen? Well, sometimes people buy for the wrong day. Four years ago, this happened more than a few times. The website was confusing, they tell us. Or, and sometimes far more amusing to me, our computer screwed up. My absolute favorite incident of this type was in my first year working at The Fair. In the middle of Saturday afternoon, a young couple presented a will call print out to the seller, who looked them up and printed out their tickets: two admission, two Sunday derby.

"That's not right," the gentleman said. "We ordered tickets for Saturday." The seller has no authority over this, and did what she was trained to do, and called me down. The gentleman presented me a print out of his order confirmation, and told me that the computer screwed up his order. I looked it over, looked it up in the system, saw that what printed looked right, and then, as I was out of options, called my supervisor - and the guy who wrote all the software being used. I told him the situation. He was immediately suspicious.

"Sounds like a scam," he said. "I'll look into it. Give me his confirmation number."

I read it off to him. He looked it up.

"Yeah, they ordered these this morning. Online sales for tonight's Derby were turned off before he ordered these."

I wondered if he saw "derby" and just assumed it was the right event.

"Nope, it's clearly a different day. This happens every year. They go online, see that it's sold out, buy the wrong day anyway, then come to the fair and get angry, hoping to score some free tickets. Send them up to the main office."

I explained to the couple that when they bought the tickets, online sales for Saturday were already turned off, so they couldn't have bought Saturday tickets. The gentleman was adamant that he'd chosen the Saturday Derby. As proof of this, he presented a printed out screen shot of the order page.

Showing that there was no available option for Saturday, and that he had selected Sunday.

Those are my favorite calls. Customer error where the customer provides the evidence of their error. Kind of does my job for me.
I pointed out that he had chosen Sunday, but he remained firm in his conviction that we had messed up. I let him fume, and reiterated that I was sorry, but there was nothing I could do.

It's a phrase I use often at The Fair, especially on Derby Day. If the Derby is sold out, I'm sorry, I can't give you tickets. I know you ordered a while ago, but I can't do anything. I can't give you a refund. My boss can't give you a refund. It's not our money. If I could, I would give all of these people free tickets and be done with it. It would amount to about 20 people per year. Big whoop. I am, unfortunately, bound by regulations set by The Fair, who is in turn set by regulations in the fire code. The grandstands seat 5,000, so that's all that can go in.

Still, the customers fume and rage. I let them. Thankfully, none of them have been physically or verbally abusive towards me or the sellers (I like to think that part of my job is to give the customer someplace other than the seller to direct their ire - the sellers have nothing to do with the way the system works, or the way the prices are set, or really any of the problems they call me down for), though some have come close. As long as they aren't abusive, I let them fume. I understand that anger, that impotent rage. Something went wrong, I'm not going to get to do what I've been planning all year. There's got to be somebody to blame.

Most times, it really is a customer error. They entered their credit card information wrong. They entered their name wrong (honestly, how difficult is it to put your last name in the "last name" field?). 99% of the time, though, they flat-out refuse to admit they could have made a mistake. It's out system at fault, not them.

Last year, I dealt with a woman and her sizeable family who stood outside the gate for over an hour arguing that they had bought tickets online. I don't think they were even there for the Derby, they just wanted to get into The Fair. She didn't have a confirmation e-mail or number, but she swore she'd ordered tickets. She wasn't in the system. No version of her name was in the system. We check myriad credit card numbers, and none of them were in the system. We got partial matches, but none with her name or address. Her kids ran to the car to get other possibilities. She tried to pull up the confirmation e-mail she thought she'd gotten. Another of her kids was trying to pull up her bank account statement on another phone to prove the money had been deducted (a rather lengthy process as no one knew what credit card she'd used).

I'm no genius with money, but it seems to me that if you have so many credit cards that you can't remember which card you used for what purchase, it's time to rethink your lifestyle. Honestly, I speak from experience as someone who used to live something like that. Simplify.

At any rate, she couldn't find any shred of evidence she'd finished - or even started, really - the order, so we couldn't, either. She refused to believe this. She'd placed the order; she'd seen the money taken out of her account (one thing I suspect, again from personal experience, is that the type of people getting by through the use of multiple credit cards because they don't actually have enough cash to pay for things aren't checking their accounts all that rigorously; I could be wrong). The kicker is that she could have been in the fair an hour earlier if she'd just accepted this and bought tickets. She couldn't do that, she said, because she didn't have enough in her checking account to get the cash to cover it.

I really try not to make judgements just based on appearance, but I think I'm somewhat decent on appraising character after meeting and talking to someone for a bit. My comments up above, about this family living on credit cards, and probably not being the financial hawks they were claiming to be? Yeah, I stand by them.

She didn't have enough money to buy the tickets. That's why she'd bought online, so that she could use a credit card. Some people, like my sister's first husband, uses his credit card a lot, but is diligent about paying it off. It works well for him. He gets reward points, has excellent credit, doesn't pay much in interest, and because he's so good about paying, they keep extending his limit, so he has a good "emergency" cushion. People like this customer, and many others we see every Derby Day, seemingly don't get it. They think it's a "magical goodies creator" that can get them what they want right away, and put off the financial impact for a while, not realizing that it just keeps ballooning.

There are people for whom I truly feel bad when I have to break the bad news. This year, I was called to look up an order for an older couple. When I got there, he handed me his ID, and I looked up the order. It was in the system, but it was not completed. I later found out it was an issue with the expiration date being entered wrong. That's it, the expiration date! Something so seemingly simple and benign, but without which the order can't be completed. What made this news especially tough to deliver was the address on the ID, telling me this couple was up here in New Hampshire from St Petersburg, Flordia. Most guests turned away can just go home. Not this couple.

One of the first customers I had to turn away understood that she had messed up, and took responsibility. That's always nice, but makes me sympathize with them so much more. They were so excited, they'd gotten through the traffic, and through the crowd at the gate. They could see The Fair through the fence, but they couldn't go any farther.

In truth, I feel bad for all of these people I have to turn away. By Saturday of this fair, I am tired. My legs hurt, my feet hurt. If I'm lucky, my ankles are only sore. My shirt is soaked through with sweat. All of that is bearable, though, if I can end a trip to the gate by handing tickets over to a customer. Sure, when things go wrong they fume and rage, and sure, some of them are trying to pull some petty scam (though I feel like that has dropped off over the 4 years I've done this), but I really do feel bad for these people who are so excited to be coming to The Fair, and in particular, The Derby, only to find out something went wrong. Even though it is almost always user error, I feel bad for them.

I felt bad for the woman yesterday who claimed to be from Florida (though when I looked up her order, the address was local) who bought 11 tickets online, thinking she'd bought Derby tickets, when she'd actually bought 10 adult admissions and 1 child admission (which should have tipped her off, as there are no "child" grandstand tickets - you take up a seat, you pay the same as all the other seat-taker-uppers). I felt bad for the family a couple of years ago who bought for the wrong day. I even felt bad for all those people who thought their order was complete, and printed out the "confirm your order" screen, rather than the "your order has been placed" screen, when the system still did that a few years back (fortunately, that's been done away with).

This is one of the biggest events of the year for many of this people, and while I might find that a little silly, who am I to judge? I used to sit in the Whittemore Center lobby at 7am to get the best seats when Maine came to town to play UNH, and actually looked forward to those games because of it. It was a fun way to spend a Friday or Saturday. We'd play games, watch movies, order food. The staff left a door open so we could duck inside and use the restroom as needed. One year, Maine's head coach came out and chatted with me for a bit. Other people line up days in advance for concert tickets. Still other people line up around the block for a cupcake or a seat at a trendy noodle bar (admittedly, I might consider doing this for David Chang' noodle bar). I've stayed up all night reading or playing video games. I've waited in lines for midnight showings of comic book movies. I've pre-ordered CDs and books. I've contributed to Kickstarter for projects by my favorite webcomic artists.

We all have different tastes. I'm not a fan of tractors (though I appreciate the historical tractors on display here) or pick-up trucks or demolition derbies, or many of the other redneck-y attractions here at The Fair. But then, this isn't a fair for me. The people coming here are into this stuff, and it is important to them. They are willing to spend more in a day than I spend on groceries in a month (probably close to what I spent on my UNH season tickets this year), and while I think that they might need to recheck their priorities, maybe I'm wrong. Who knows what these people do the rest of the year. This weekend, they want to attend Derby Day at Hopkinton because it makes them happy. What else matters?

*This year, the Derby started at 6:30, and was done before 8:00. Unheard of. The finals are usually just starting when I'm heading home for the night between 8:30 and 9:00. Not the first year I've heard grumblings of disappointment after the Derby. Maybe there's too much build-up?

**Yes, the Derby sells out, but if you really want to get in, there are always people selling spare tickets when the crowds line up to get into the grandstand, so all hope is not lost.

On Happiness

I am a pretty happy guy. I just got a pretty nice new-to-me car. We live in a sweet apartment that has space, central heating and cooling, plows in the winter, as well as access to a pool, hot tub, and exercise room. I just got married.

I cannot, in all honesty, say that I love my job, though to simply say that I do not hate it is not fair either. I like aspects of my job - love them, even - and I like the environment.  I have flexible hours, a great degree of autonomy, and a really good boss who seems to understand that mistakes happen, and that it is important for employees to feel valued and respected, which I do. Unlike some jobs I have, I almost never dread going in to work, and the days that I lie in bed and ponder calling in sick to spend the day sleeping in or vegging on the couch have more to do with my wife having the day off than anything going on at work. I think the best way to put it is that I enjoy my job, and that is pretty darn good.

I mentioned a wife in that last paragraph, and I did indeed get married recently.  She is beautiful and smart, and can light up my day with her smile. I've known her for over 6 years, have lived with her for four, and I still want to spend every waking (and, frankly, non-waking) moment with her. I've known plenty of women.  I've had crushes and gone on dates, and even been in relationships. There is one big difference with my wife, though: she is the first woman to make me want to better myself.
I snore, and a big reason for that is that I am overweight. Being overweight leads to other issues too, from not fitting in certain seats to not being able to be as active as we would both like. I want to lose weight so that I can snore less, and she can sleep better. I want to lose weight so that when we get on the plane to go on vacation, I am not spilling over into her seat. When I was being fitted for my suit for the wedding recently, and the shirt they'd picked out for me (that had fit a couple months earlier) was too tight, I was devastated. Not because I was fat - I've been fat for a while now - but because I felt like I'd let her down.

As an example of how awesome she is, she saw my expression, squeezed my hand, and smiled up at me.

This is not to say things have always been rosy. There have been some rough patches. It's not easy to balance school, work, and home when you're working towards a normal degree, let alone a nursing degree. I don't mean to disparage those that have gotten an MBA, or have gone back to school to get a degree in something like English or Economics. The thing is, for most degrees, you work during the day, go to class at couple nights during the week, and do your homework the other nights. The rest of the time, you tend to the house, spend time with the family, veg on the couch, etc. When you're taking night classes to work towards an associate' and then a bachelor's degree in nursing, things are not that simple.

First off, it's not just class, it a class and a clinical, meaning the nights you're not sitting in a classroom, you're working in a hospital. So, there goes your weeknight free time. Secondly, if you're working, it's probably in a hospital, and while I'm sure there are nursing positions in the hospital that have very regular hours - working until 3:00 means you leave at 3:00. Unfortunately, the ER is not one of those places. So, if you work in the ER in one town, and take classes 30-40 minutes away, you're not going to want to take shifts that might not let you out on time and make you late for class. This means nothing 1st shift, and 2nd shift is pretty much right out.

This leaves 3rd shift. Overnights. Even on weekends. In this scenario, your week looks something like: get up on Monday around 3pm, shower, eat breakfast, start homework/prep for clinical. 6pm, head to class/clinical. 10pm, finish with class/clinical, go to work for 11pm, get out around 7:30am, drive home and flop into bed to sleep. For a few hours during the day. On the rare night you're not working, you try to catch up on sleep. On the nights you don't have class/clinical, you're doing work for them.

You know what's not included in that schedule? Free time, because you don't really have any.
This was my wife's schedule for the better part of three years. When she graduated, both she and our families were effusive in their praise of the amount of work involved, but not just on her part. They were praising me, too. I deflected most of it, usually with the argument, "What else was I supposed to do?" because, for the most part, that was how it was.  She was in school, and needed my support.
Here's the deep dark secret about that: it took me a while to realize this. For the past few years, living alone, I did things a certain way. In particular, I wrote when I wanted to, did dishes rarely, and barely cooked for myself. After we started dating, I started learning how to actually cook. When she moved in, I started to care about dishes getting clean (mostly because we needed them to cook). For a while,  we shared in these chores, which we great, because it gave me time to write, or play video games, or read, or veg. Not long after she started school, I undertook another NaNoWriMo challenge (write a 50,000-word novel in a month), but I had trouble finding time to write, as I had to come home and cook dinner every night, which meant washing the dishes from the night before, which meant first emptying the dish drainer from the last time dishes were washed. By the time I was done all of this, I was tired, and just wanted to sit on the couch, so I did. Tension built, until one day I came home and, according to my wife, "Looked like someone killed [my] dog." I told her that I was frustrated that nothing was done in the kitchen (she hadn't worked the night before, so she didn't HAVE to sleep in), and that I felt like I was alone with the chores (except laundry - she did a lot of laundry, as she needed scrubs constantly). Her response was that I was alone. She was in the house, but all of her energy went towards school and work.

It took me a couple months after that to fully realize what she meant, and how selfish I was being. She was working as much as she could, and spending most of the rest of her time dealing with school stuff. She wasn't ignoring me, or bored with me, or losing interest in me (all very real thoughts that went through my head), or just slacking off. In fact, she was doing the opposite of slacking off; she was working two full-time jobs that consumed most of her time and energy. For me to complain that she didn't wash the dishes, and how that was a terrible inconvenience for me because I wanted to do something else that night was pretty selfish of me. I worked one job (for a while it was a miserable job, but that's neither here nor there), came home, and had the whole night to myself.

Once this dawned on me, there was no other option that seemed palatable to me but to support my wife in any way I could.

Now, as noted, when she started school, I was in a miserable state. I hated my job and made no money. Around the time she started school, I started helping a buddy at a couple of local fairs in the fall, which helped bring in some extra money. More important, it led to my current job, just a few months after working at the fairs. Suddenly I was making money more money in a more enjoyable workplace. This didn't curb my selfishness, but I think it helped me finally see it.

She had nudged me to work at the fairs. She nudged me to apply for the new job. She got me to eat less processed for and to cook more for myself. She has repeatedly given me confidence and support, and I felt like I let her down. I couldn't let that keep happening.

I like to think I took some things away from that. Our needs might not always be in sync, but we support each other the best we can. Neither of us is perfect; we don't always live up to our nobler aspirations, but we've each other, and support each other. I do what I can for her whenever I can, not because I have to, but because I am a happy guy, she is the main reason for my happiness, and I want nothing more in the world than for her to be as happy as me.