Lady Gaga grief

Lady Gaga performs in Seoul in 2012. Korea Times file

By Jacco Zwetsloot

In April 2012 Lady Gaga came to town for one concert only at Seoul Olympic Stadium. We at the Discover Seoul Desk were tasked with selling tickets to any USFK person who wanted to go.

My immediate boss, a retired US Army sergeant major I'll call Cortez, was convinced that this would make our firm a lot of money. It also gave my team and myself a whole lot of headaches. In the beginning the ticketing agency allocated us 200 tickets. The initial batch sold out, and we kept getting calls from anxious would-be concertgoers, so the struggle was on to get more tickets. Galaxyjean head office was able to get more, at first 50 and then another 100, and I think we finally had almost 400 tickets sold. We arranged charter buses to would pick soldiers up outside their base and take them to the stadium.

It sounds simple enough, but when you factor in certain elements, it became a wellspring of potential incidents.

To begin with, we were not just selling tickets on Yongsan Garrison. Our tour company, Galaxyjean, also had offices at Camp Casey up in Dongducheon and Camp Humphreys in Pyeongtaek. So buses also had to go to these bases to collect Lady Gaga fans.

Tickets were sold on the phone and in person at all three locations, and payment was accepted in cash or credit card in Korean and US currencies. This made the spreadsheet of tickets sold and payments quite a mess. If we were doing it now it would all be on a single spreadsheet in the internet cloud, and there would be an automated ways to order tickets. There were cash and credit cards and the spreadsheets were not synched, so there were constant phone calls between the three offices and Galaxyjean HQ to determine how many tickets were sold and how many were left.

Not everyone wanted to take the bus; some people decided to make their own way to the stadium. In the beginning, we only offered a package including bus transport, but later we were instructed to sell just the ticket (plus a booking fee) or ticket plus transport. Of course, people being people, some had more complicated requests than others, and sometimes minds would change ― from a package with bus transfer to just the ticket, to back again; first ordering three tickets, and then increasing that to five, and then one friend would drop out, and oh one friend is paying for the ticket on Camp Casey but taking the bus at Yongsan, and then of course there is that couple who are getting on the bus at Camp Humphreys but not going to stay at the Dragon Hill Lodge on Yongsan, and so one ad infinitum… This made bus lists quite a mess.

Ideally we would have had separate lists for coming from and going to each of the three bases ― six lists in all. But because there were not enough people from Camp Humphreys to fill two buses, one of the two had to swing by Yongsan first to pick up passengers, making it even more tricky.

This was the first time our firm and our team had taken on a project with this many moving parts, and I was getting conflicting instructions from my bosses and also from hotel management ― more about that later.

Finally the great day of the concert came. I was running the Discover Seoul Desk that day, and was hoping to be able to direct people to gate 1 of Yongsan where the bus would depart from, and then be rid of the matter. But about half an hour before rollout time, Cortez told me that I had to board a bus and go along for the evening.

We were supposed to leave something like 5 p.m, for a concert due to start at about 7:30pm. We ended up leaving closer to 6 p.m. The journey should normally take 51 minutes, but on that day, a Friday, it took more than two hours. As we got closer to Olympic Stadium, the traffic snarl worsened, and I began to worry that we would not make it.

Our buses had approached the stadium from the northern side, and the drop-off point was to be on the south. It became clear that we would never make it that far, so at a certain point, when we were stuck just west of the stadium, Cortez, who was driving his own car in front of the bus, came on to our bus and told people that they would have to walk from that point. He also warned them to be back at the buses by 10:45 (the concert was supposed to end around then) or they would be left behind.

While the fans went in, Cortez, myself and I some other Galaxyjean staff spent several hours outside the stadium worrying about how to make sure nobody would get lost after the concert. We made some crude signs directing people to where the buses would be ― at the southern edge of the park ― and waited. And waited. Of course the concert started late and finished even later. About half of the people came out around 10:45. At some point Cortez decided to wait until the last concertgoers came out.

I was sitting in the front of the bus and those who had heeded Cortez' original warning and left the concert well before the end were getting more and more frustrated that they had come out when they were told, while the stragglers would catch both the end of the concert and the bus home. I bore the brunt of some of this frustration, but the majority was reserved for Cortez. When he came to the bus, one woman threatened to report him to the hotel management. I seem to recall he gave her a false name.

When the time finally came to leave (close to midnight) Cortez offered me a ride back in his car and there was no way I was going to refuse. He dropped me off in Itaewon around 1 a.m. and I went to find some friends and drink a lot to forget about that day and Lady Gaga.

Unfortunately, it was not all over yet. There was still the final tallying and closure of the spreadsheets to be done. Because of the mess that had come beforehand, I spent a good day or two going over all the details and finding every last credit card receipt and cash payment to send to head office. One ticket somehow appeared to have been sold twice, which nearly did my head in until I found evidence of a cancellation. By the time I was done, I hoped never to hear Lady Gaga's name again.