Jason Hasselkus

Tonight was the night I was waiting for. I had gotten tickets to see a taping of the new “American Gladiator”. You know the show from yesteryear that had totally roided out guys and gals (Gladiators) competing in events against the average Joe contestant. The contestants are usually pretty good athletes themselves, so it makes the matchup pretty fun to watch. Well the problem for me started even before I got to the taping of the show. The first time I signed up for the tickets, something happened to the reservation system, which meant that they had to send me an email to let me know I needed to sign up again for the dates and number of tickets again. No big deal, I signed up for two tickets and the night before the day I was suppose to be there, I got an email saying that there would be no real tickets, just this email and directions to the studio. Again, no big deal, we just needed to find a babysitter for the kids, which turned out to be fairly easy to do.
The email stated that we should be there at least 15 minutes before the show started, which was 5:00 pm. We arrived at the studio at 4:15, to only find a huge line of people already waiting. We thought to ourselves, there is no way we are all getting into this place. By time 5 o’clock rolled around, we were still waiting in the parking garage, which means we haven’t been through security yet or shown our seats. Around 10 minutes after 5 we started to move, we were now on our way to the restrooms and then security. Security was a breeze, and while we were waiting in line we noticed that they were serving pizza. We snagged some pizza a water and later Kudo’s were brought around to us. From our other taping experiences this was really starting to look pretty good. Besides it being cold and being bored out of our mind, we still had some excitement to see the show. At about 6:30 or so we started to make our way to the stage where they were taping the show. When we walked in, it was pretty impressive with all the lights and the music going. We sat down in the second row and noted to each other how good our seats were, right in front of a pool of water that had cables hanging over it.
This is about the time where it started to really go down hill. Understand that at this point we have been on the studio lot for more than 3 hours and only had a small bite to eat, and we have driven from southern Orange County to see this event. We actually thought we were going to see the contestants battle the Gladiators. As we sat there we noticed that the contraption in front of us was being taken down, and at that moment, Josh our page, come over to the group and explained that we were more or less the back up audience. He was very careful not to say “stand by” audience, as that might infer that we weren’t going to see any action at all. As it was then explained to us, we were still going to see action because we had huge TV monitors to watch the events on and if by some chance the Gladiator lost the event, they were going to be thrown into the pool right in front of us. Wow so we were now hoping for the chance to see a Gladiator loose. No thanks, I asked Josh where the exit was and cut my losses. Not only did they loose me from the crowd but also lost my ratings. I’m not going to watch that crap now.
Here’s what they could have done better.

1. Tell me when I’m in line that there is a good chance that I’m not going to see the live action. You know, be honest with me and tell me I’m the second best audience.
2. Have different designated areas for individual ticket holders and group ticket holders. The most frustrating part is watching huge groups of people get in before you, even though I was there before them.
3. Entertain me while I’m waiting. At least put the old show on while we are waiting. The sitting and waiting with no information was making the crowd crazy.

Now if you already have tickets, here are some things you might want to do to make sure you actually see the show:

• Arrive at least an hour early to the Studio. However, the more time the better. 45 minutes is not early enough.
• Prepare yourself for a lot of standing around.
• See if you can get group tickets and make sure you go to the front of the line and tell them your with a group. Every group that I saw got in and had good seats.
• Eat before you go
• If there is something else you might wish you were doing, go do that instead. The amount of action that you see compared to how much waiting around you do, doesn’t pay off in the end.

If anyone else has similar experiences or a different experience, I would love to hear about them.