Here’s how this went down. Taylor Swift was playing a show in Houston the night before the Super Bowl. You could not buy tickets. You had to win tickets, either through a sweepstakes (er, Swiftstakes) or by having the TS Team find you on social media because you’re a raging Swift fan and give you a pass to the show. This may shock you, but while I might be a Swiftie, I’m not a social media power Swifter. I knew that wasn’t going to work and my fortune with sweepstakes is historically low.

Time to take matters into my own hands. Aside from Taylor, the other big player in this show was AT&T/DirectTV…the sponsor of the whole thing. Since Melinda Ann and I had successully vlogged a T-Swift show before, I thought I’d reach out to AT&T corporate and see if we could go as…you know…vloggers. The most charming email I could write was sent to several people at AT&T (and I can spin a charming e-missive, you know).

Eric from AT&T answered, and he said he’d try to work it out. 2 weeks later, after I had given up and was deciding I should spend Super Bowl Saturday doing…nothing…Eric came through with 2 passes. NOT ONLY two tickets to the show, but we also got to get all VIP Party with it. It was so fun I had to split it into 2 vlogs. Here we go:

The moral of the story here…well, I’ve been saying it’s “Just Ask.” I’d like to think the asterisk on this (so, it’d actually be more like “Just Ask*”) is to offer something, and have the goods to back up the offer of usefulness. I’m glad I didn’t have to tell Eric I was a vlogger and then not have any vlogs to show for it. I was a year into the process and by then I had quite the backlog.

I don’t know if Eric dug the vlog aspect, or the email, or if he is just a really nice dude (we know he is!), but it was necessary in my mind to accompany The Ask with The Offer. Something to think about going forward…and if any of you guys want something seemingly out of reach…try to be useful and then just go for it.

Thanks to Eric and AT&T and DirectTV and TAYLOR SWIFT and her people because…a heck of a good time was had. Let’s do this again? Yes? Yes.