No Screw In the Seat? Think Again.

This morning's Journal-Gazette has the most recent spin on the outdated, outmoded dinosaur known as the Memorial Coliseum featured on its Metro page. Remember the much-ballyhooed expansion? Remember how we replaced all the seats in the place? Remember how it cost $35 million dollars to expand the Coliseum, instead of building a new one downtown, where it belongs? Remember how we were so proud that our arena now had seating for 10,000 people?

Scratch that. Now there's seating for about 300.

EVERY PERMANENT SEAT in the Coliseum now needs to be replaced. Apparently the bottoms of some seats weren't properly screwed on, and the unsecured seat bottoms would fall off, leaving the seat unusable.

And guess what? It's only gonna cost us about five dollars a seat for those 9,867 seats to be replaced! The compant that installed them is gonna pay the rest, since they had a three year warranty!

Randy Brown (whom I like, by the way) said that their hope was 'that the seats would last 25 years'...and that 'they've had a number of failures.'

He also said, and I quote from the article, "It's nice to have a company stand behind their product."

Let's regroup here and calculate some facts. The old seats lasted fifty years. The new seats, a little less than three.

Do we need to throw 50 grand at the company that provided the original piss poor product?

Sure, why not. It's cheaper than starting from scratch....and what's another 50,ooo dollars after we've wasted 34 and a half million? Hell, that 50 grand wouldn't even pay half of Randy's salary this year.

Looks like we're gonna get our seat bottoms screwed at the Coliseum....and it's only gonna cost us fifty grand. What a deal!

Proving there's more than one way to get a screwing in your seat. Welcome to Fort Wayne, Indiana. Maybe we ARE as dumb as the magazines claim.