UNITED STATES — Aging parents across the country encouraged their children to “just pick up the phone and give Ticketmaster a call” if they want to secure tickets to Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour, frustrated sources who actually grew up using the internet confirmed.
“Phones are for phoning, not for watching your little videos and sending emails to your friends,” said 60-year-old Carol Clydermann. “My daughter looked at me like I had two heads when I told her to pick up the phone. I have a nice cordless phone that is fully charged, so she shouldn’t worry about it dying if she gets put on hold. I was young once too, and when I saw Wilson Phillips in 1992 I called and got my tickets no problem.”
“Look, there is a number right there on the website, this isn’t rocket science” the elder Clydermann insisted, lowering her reading glasses and emphatically tapping the Yahoo! search results on her iPad.
Adriana Naughton, 29, is one of the many so-called “Swifties” who eventually resorted to fibbing after fielding multiple “really annoying” requests from her father.
“Dad kept saying I should ‘stop crying and just call [Gillette Stadium] directly.’ He told me that one of my uncles used to have Pats season tickets in 2004, so if I used his name, there wouldn’t be any problem,” said Naughton while signing a petition to join a class action lawsuit against Ticketmaster. “The final straw was when he suggested we drive down to Foxboro and go directly to the box office, I couldn’t stand a two-hour car ride with him listening to right-wing talk radio so I finally just told him yes, I left a voicemail with ‘Lucy’ and just pivoted to asking about the turkeys on sale at Costco super fast.”
Family therapist Matthew Silvio, LCSW, explained that in times of extreme stress, parents naturally turn to trusted, familiar solutions to try to help their children.
“In their day, the telephone was an effective way for the Boomer generation to connect and reliably obtain desired items,” said Silvio. “When they perceive a threat to their offspring, such as a natural disaster or a 12-hour error-riddled online ticket queue, phones may be inaccurately viewed as a lifeline. They don’t understand that the world has changed, paper tickets don’t exist, and that the people running Ticketmaster should be dragged out into the street and executed.”
At press time, the nation’s parents had moved on to asking whether anyone had even tried asking the manager at the local Strawberries music store, which shuttered in 2006.