Mysterious

I spent $52 today. You want to know what I bought? Well, here it is. Three $12 tickets to see Disney on Ice the Princess Edition. While I'm generally more interested in the Nemo or Incredibles version of Disney on Ice, a little person I know is very interested in princesses right now so we are going to watch the princesses dance around for a lovely two hours or so.

If you are any good at math you will notice that $12 X3 does not equal $52. It actually equals $36. I tried doing the math too when the online price showed up and said $52. Where does the rest of the money go? Into a little something called "Processing Fees" and "Handling Fees." Handling fees are $2 of which the handling fees don't change if you make the tickets Will Call or Mailed to you. You would think that if you pick them up at the Will Call window the night of the performance it would save you the $2 handling fee. Apparently, every time that ticket person moves their hand to put the ticket out the bottom of the plastic protective window, they get paid $2. Not a bad job if you ask me. I would love $2 every time I moved my hand. I would have very valuable hands.

The other $16 dollars (the price of 1.333_ more tickets) goes into what is called Processing Fees. What does that mean? What is a processing fee? If someone reading this works for TicketsWest and knows the answer please fill me in. I would love to know what my money is going towards. At least with the handling fee you can tell somewhat from the title that its going towards the handling of the ticket. The placing of the ticket into an envelope to be mailed to me. The handing of the ticket out the plastic protective window. Processing though.....I'm not sure what that means. Printing the ticket? Putting the seat row and number on the ticket? I'm not even creative enough to come up with any other options for what a processing fee would be. Are we paying for the ink and paper of the tickets? Is it special paper and ink that costs a fortune? I'm not really sure what other options for a processing fee would be.

It's frustrating the things you have to pay for that you don't have much of a choice about. Things like gas, parking places, tickets for Disney on Ice. I know I don't "have" to pay for these things. I could stop driving a car that takes gas. I could stop parking my car anywhere in a downtown area and just walk everywhere. I could veto TicketsWest and not go to Disney on Ice. Life just seems too short to worry about money all of the time, but I hate wasting it, especially when I don't know where it's going. (Really, where does the money go when you pay for parking? I mean the parking lot that has been paid off years ago that is deteriorating and broken? Where does that money go? Not to fix up the parking lot obviously.)

If I never had to deal with TicketsWest again in my life, I would be a very happy person.