Don't ever book with Eventim.

It is said that there are five stages of grief. There are just two stages of dealing with thieving ticket agents and they're pathetic excuse for customer service, especially if said thieving ticket agent is called Eventim.

The two stages are:

1) Getting very angry
2) Being rather flippant

The background of the whole thing is that I booked some tickets to see Pat Metheny at the Hammersmith Apollo in June. I booked them in March - a month ago. As well as paying for the tickets I paid over £20 in booking and postage fees. Rather excessive I thought but at least it should guarantee good service. Did it bollocks.

The tickets were confirmed as shipped a day or so after I bought them, but a week later I hadn't received them. I got in touch with Eventim who said that it I waited until 5 days before the event they'd arrange for me to collect them on the night. I pointed out how foolish it would be to cut it so fine given that things obviously had already gone wrong once. I asked them to send them out by recorded delivery instead. Failing that they could make them available for immediate collection at the venue and refund their fees.

I got an email back telling me what their policy was as if that was a genuine reason why they couldn't carry out a simple recovery operation for lost tickets as and when circumstances necessitated. So I phoned them up. After speaking to another policy-parroting zombie I was handed to a manager who first attempted to fob me off with the same nonsense about policy and then tried to suggest that it was there to prevent ticket fraud. The best I could get out of her was a promise to contact the venue and ask what they would allow the ticket agents to do.

Then I got this email.

It made me angry, so I sent this reply.

A week later I had calmed down a bit and resigned myself to having tried everything and just thought that I would have to put up with the stress and if the worst came to the worst and the four of us didn't get in I could always take legal action.

But then I got this reply.

What was the point in getting angry again? So I got very flippant. Having been reading a lot of David Thorne's email conversations (highly recommended!) this week possibly had some influence on what I wrote in response.