So today is my Mom's birthday, and she decided she wanted tickets to see Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band at Giants Stadium in July. The shows happen to be at the same time as Macworld so it actually works out pretty well.
So at 9 AM, I had various computers going on ticketmaster.com and had two phone lines and a few cell phones trying to reach Ticketmaster. It's very hard to get tickets to see Springsteen no matter what venue he's playing so we had to be on the ball. His CBS special last night only fueled the chances that we wouldn't get tickets.
Immediately, all of my computers were placed in queues of 15 minutes or longer. After a while, they would time out, one by one, or would go down in time until it would reach 'less than one minute' when they would either shoot back up in wait time or give me some kind of bogus error.
My Mom was in a queue for about 40 minutes and it finally got down to 'less than one minute' when she got an error. When she refreshed the page, she was told tickets were sold out for the event. After sitting by the computer for 2.5 hours on your birthday to try and get tickets to a concert, only to come up empty handed, she was very upset.
She came into my room, very disappointed saying that she got the message that tickets were sold out. Just as I was about to close down, I got into the system. I scored 6 tickets in the nosebleed section (325) for Thursday night.
From what I've heard, New York radio stations were airing ads for some 1-800 ticket agency before the tickets were even on sale advertising that they had 'thousands of seats'. eBay auctions have sets of 2 seats together up for $1000.
But after trying non stop for 2 hours and 22 minutes, I finally got into the system and scored the tickets. It was almost a ruined birthday so I'm glad things worked out, but Ticketmaster has to get their act together because scalpers are scoring all of the tickets over regular people. To wait in a queue for an hour, only for it to shoot out an error is totally unacceptable.
The sad thing is that they probably won't ever fix the problems as they have no incentive to- they are a monopoly. If there was an alternate ticket broker besides Ticketmaster, I would have gladly tried them first.
So at 9 AM, I had various computers going on ticketmaster.com and had two phone lines and a few cell phones trying to reach Ticketmaster. It's very hard to get tickets to see Springsteen no matter what venue he's playing so we had to be on the ball. His CBS special last night only fueled the chances that we wouldn't get tickets.
Immediately, all of my computers were placed in queues of 15 minutes or longer. After a while, they would time out, one by one, or would go down in time until it would reach 'less than one minute' when they would either shoot back up in wait time or give me some kind of bogus error.
My Mom was in a queue for about 40 minutes and it finally got down to 'less than one minute' when she got an error. When she refreshed the page, she was told tickets were sold out for the event. After sitting by the computer for 2.5 hours on your birthday to try and get tickets to a concert, only to come up empty handed, she was very upset.
She came into my room, very disappointed saying that she got the message that tickets were sold out. Just as I was about to close down, I got into the system. I scored 6 tickets in the nosebleed section (325) for Thursday night.
From what I've heard, New York radio stations were airing ads for some 1-800 ticket agency before the tickets were even on sale advertising that they had 'thousands of seats'. eBay auctions have sets of 2 seats together up for $1000.
But after trying non stop for 2 hours and 22 minutes, I finally got into the system and scored the tickets. It was almost a ruined birthday so I'm glad things worked out, but Ticketmaster has to get their act together because scalpers are scoring all of the tickets over regular people. To wait in a queue for an hour, only for it to shoot out an error is totally unacceptable.
The sad thing is that they probably won't ever fix the problems as they have no incentive to- they are a monopoly. If there was an alternate ticket broker besides Ticketmaster, I would have gladly tried them first.
<img src="graemlins/hmmm.gif" border="0" alt="[Hmmm]" /> <img src="graemlins/oyvey.gif" border="0" alt="[oyvey]" /> 
