If I were a luckier person, or a person with a few hundo burning a hole in my pocket, this would be a post about how wonderfully mind altering the Interpol show at the Riv was last night.

Unfortunately, I am unlucky and kind of poor so this is a post about the new WORST. THING. EVER.

Rescalpers!

My sister and I headed over to the show at about 5:30 when the doors opened last night in hopes that we could score some above face value tickets. Nothing too crazy, maybe $40 each. Why didn’t we have tickets for this show? Not because we are lazy, but because Ticketmaster slapped a $7.50 service charge on a $20 ticket. Over a third of the price of the ticket itself! Don’t get me wrong, I would be more than willing to pay $40 to see Interpol. But only if that $40 went to the band, not the money grubbing whores at Ticketmaster.

On top of that, the box office at the Riv is only open on nights that there are shows, and it only opens 2 hours prior to each show (read: the goddamn box office is never open).

So we didn’t get tickets before they sold out ON PRINCIPLE. Because we were damning the man. And Ticketmaster is that man.

Anyway, back to the original story. So we head towards the venue, and see 50 million (read: about 35) kids standing on the corner of Lawrence and Broadway. “Is everyone here waiting for tickets?”… “Yeah”… “Fuck”. We stand around there for about 20 minutes, and decide to disperse down the streets, hoping to catch people as they arrive and be away from the crowd, heightening the likelihood of finding tickets.

And then we both notice it. These small groups of guys that are OBVIOUSLY not planning on attending the show. The guys that keep getting shooed away by the Riviera staff, while the rest of the kids are allowed to mingle around in hopes of tickets. And they were everywhere. Like the plague. And they seemed to control all the tickets. They were pushy and insistent. They always got to people first. One guy swooped right up before us and got a ticket from a young guy walking up the street. Seriously, if you are a human being with a soul, and you are heading to a sold-out show, who do you sell your ticket to? The shady-ass guy, or the two girls who look like fans?

Apparently, most people will choose the shady-ass guy. We gave up an hour and half later and went over to Zephyr for ice cream. As we were driving away, we saw at least 15 more rescalpers. And we both decided that these are our new least favorite people.