I love focus groups. I don’t recall how I got my foot in the door in Chicago but once I did one I was asked back a lot and it was easy cash for simply giving your opinion about a product. I hadn’t been part of one since moving down here but finally was invited to one for the Atlanta Spirit – the group that owns the Thrashers, Hawks, and Philips Arena. The topic was about them renovating a part of the arena that is an underutilized bar area. The “pay” was tickets of my choice to an upcoming concert, a Hawks game or a Thrashers game. Obviously we all know what I chose.
While I didn’t get my top 3 games I chose, I had a nice surprise when the tickets arrived in the mail. I had assumed they’d be giving me 2 tickets but it wound up being 4. Making me even happier was that they were 5th row lower bowl seats in the corner next to the goal line. So, for less than 2 hours of me getting to yap my jaw and give my uninformed opinions, I got $480 worth of tickets!
Once again, it’s amazing how different the 2 sides of Philips Arena are. Instead of a fattening gooey pizza slice, I had a brick-oven cooked cappicola pizza. Waiters get your beer order in less than 2 minutes. Basically the only thing they don’t do for you on the club side is to shake your wiener or wipe your pootytang after you’re done peeing. Even the peanuts are served warm and they give another bag to put your shells in.
We park in an outdoor lot that holds maybe 100 cars that is opposite Centennial Olympic Park. Since it is an unmanned lot at night, I’d guess that 70% of the games I’ve been to, the automatic barrier doesn’t raise and someone has to snap it off in order to get out of there. Unfortunately, I had to be That Guy for the first time on Saturday. The barrier worked for the car ahead of me and then it decided to stop working. I tried backing up 3 times to no avail. The next step is to see if you can jam it up but that never works. The next step, and I hate to do it but it’s necessary if you want to get out that evening, is to snap the wooden barrier off. This always brings a round of cheers from everyone in the vicinity but it still sucks that they never fix this stupid machine. You’d think after the 200th time of that barrier being snapped, the person in the morning would tell the lot owner that maybe the machine doesn’t work properly.