What Do You Do?

"I get that you're a Ticket Chick, but what do you DO? You just sell tickets, right?"

This is a question that I, and others who work in ticketing, get asks often. It's definitely a profession that until you've lived it, it's difficult to understand. Even when you are currently living it, it's a little difficult to describe. If I handled sales, people could understand it. But what exactly does "ticket operations" mean?

Every Ticket Chick and Ticket Dude has different responsibilities, but almost all of us will tell you that no two days are the same. I think that's what makes it difficult to explain to people what we actually do all 9 hours that we are in the office.

Let me take you behind the locked doors and bullet proof glass, to give you a glimpse into a day today.

The morning HAS to start off with my coffee. Our office opens at 8am, and while I will help any customers who come in person at that time, I do not answer phone calls until 9am. My boss laughs at me when I tell him that it's just better for all involved if I have that extra hour to drink my coffee, catch up on emails, and organize my to-do list for the day.

After my coffee, I did one of the more essential, yet seemingly boring parts of my job, I updated the office whiteboard calendar with all of the events for this semester. Now, some people may not need to see their life in massive sections of time, but in ticket operations, it's handy to be able to glance and see your semester in one look. All games, special events, deadlines, days we're taking off, etc. are placed on the white board. It's the brain of the office for days when we can't remember our own names!

Next, I set up templates with all of the games for our monthly worker schedules. One of my duties is staffing for each game. We have some amazing people who work for us on game nights, and our jobs are so much easier because of them! Many of them have been with our office for years and can handle minor problems without us intervening, so it lets us sit back and take an extra breath on game nights. After  tackling the templates for our February, March, April/May schedules, I printed out the February template. Since next week is slammed for us event wise, I want to try and get a solid base of this taken care of this afternoon. Usually, I draft a couple of worker schedules before I get to one that I feel comfortable with. I need this schedule to go out after MLK Day, so it's time to start thinking about it.

Before stopping for a lunch break, I jotted down a tentative to-do list for next week that only involved our special events. We have 4 events next week, so I jotted down generally what needed to be done for each event. I went a head and made up my bank sheets for those events (bank sheets are what let my sellers know how much money they have in their starting bank, and then they fill out their sales on the sheet at the end of the night.) We have a game on Saturday, so I also went ahead and filled out my bank sheets and created my banks for Saturday night. In our line of work, anything that can be done in advance gets done in advance so you don't have to stress it on game night!

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LUNCH BREAK

Ate, finished a book, snuck in a quick workout, started drafting this blog post

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I started after lunch reviewing the emails I forced myself not to review while I was technically at lunch. When your box office doesn't close for lunch, sometimes it means you're eating while answering phones, or being available to answer phones or help any customers that may show up over lunch. This makes it difficult not to just take care of small projects during lunch, but I try hard to give myself the hour of NOT having to do anything that isn't necessary right then.

I reviewed the email containing all of the particulars for our basketball games this month, and took care of anything that needed to be taken care of on our end. I made notes of things that were noteworthy on the calendars to serve as reminders.

The afternoon seems to be when people come in to ask questions, so some of my well intentioned plans for the afternoon have been tabled until tomorrow. Sometimes the chats are about work, sometimes they're just to catch up. I think it's important to have the relationship with your coworkers where they feel they can come to you about anything. Everyone knows when it's time to get stuff done, so if people see you're busy, they usually don't stick around long. However, I had a few visits today that were partial work discussions, partial life discussions, and partial brainstorming sessions. I love when all three can be combined into one!

I printed our player pass list tickets for Saturday's game while one of my coworkers was chatting with me. (Two birds, one stone...and anything that can be done before game day is always helpful to get done before game day!)

I spent the bulk of my afternoon reviewing my plans and ideas to bring forward regarding group ticket pricing and group experience packages and then drafting a document to present to my boss. I also continued to do some research on something new that we plan to try next year. I spent some time jotting down notes and brainstorming our plan of action for this initiative and basically trying to think of all of the questions my boss would ask, so we can have answers going into the discussions.

Toss in some phone calls and assisting customers at the window, and you basically have my day today in a nutshell! I like the lazy days that let me catch up on paperwork and all the stuff that tends to get overlooked when I'm in game mode. Ask me this question tomorrow, and the answer will be totally different! Ask me next week when we have games galore and it won't look anything like this. That's what I love about my job. It's structured enough to keep me sane, but not so structured enough to keep me interested. Tune in for more looks behind the locked door later!