Tickets for this year’s Pan-Hellenic Council Step Show were scheduled to be available Friday at 3 p.m. However, students who pre-purchased them between Monday and Thursday received a rude awakening.
Jarrod Carrol, 18, a freshman biology pre-med student from Jacksonville, said he arrived on the Set to pick up his tickets at 2:25 p.m.
“I got here early to avoid waiting in line,” Carrol said. “But they opened one ticket line at 3:20 p.m. and used the other window to sell tickets to a comedy show that no one was buying tickets to, so I still had to wait a long time.”
By 4:15 p.m. the line stretched from the ticket booth to the steps of Lee Hall as students waited to get their tickets. While students were waiting patiently in the back of the line, the students in the front of the line were getting restless.
Unable to control the growing crowd, the show’s organizers closed the window, leaving several students confused.
Some students, like Shaneka Easterling, heard tickets would be given out at the gym and left her spot in line.
“I just want to get my ticket, go home and get ready to come back,” said Easterling, a 20-year-old sophomore business administration student from Mt. Vernon, N.Y.
Sharde Saviory, 19, a sophomore English student from Orlando, decided to wait on the Set for more information from an official source so as not to lose her place in line.
“I want someone who is in the booth to come out and tell me that they’ve moved to the gym. I am in front of the line now and I don’t want to go to gym just to get in the back of the line,” Saviory said.
The Director of Student Activities, Alice Mathis, came out to alleviate some of the growing tension by finding another location.
“We are trying to set up in the Rattler’s Den … it will take a few minutes,” Mathis said.
A few minutes turned into an hour- tickets were not distributed again until after 5 o’clock.
Some students, such as Carrol, were able to get their tickets , but still did not appreciate the inconvenience of waiting for almost two hours.
“I paid for my tickets Tuesday,” Carrol said. “This could have been avoided if I could have gotten my tickets then.”
Marlon Honeywell, the advisor to FAMU’s Pan-Hellenic Council, said the group was not responsible for printing the tickets, that they were done by an outside company.
Contact Alexia Robinson at arrobinson@yahoo.com.