I awakened to a ringing phone this morning. Neighbours calling before I was ready to face the world. They wanted to know if I could go online and get tickets to an upcoming concert.

No problemo I said. Stay on the line I said. Shouldn’t take anytime at all. At 10:00:15 am I get the prompt to complete the captcha and prove I’m human. We’re sailing along. Plopped in the number of tickets desired – 4 – and clicked the Floor seating option. I thought things were looking good.

Apparently Ticketmaster’s ordering system had other ideas.

After “waiting in line” for 9 minutes, the system returns a “no seats available” error message. So now I have to start all over again. This time I choose “best available/any price” for the 4 seats. My neighbour really wants good seats but at this point I’m thinking ANY seats would be good. Then I wait. About 20 minutes this time. 30 minutes since the tickets went on sale.

Only to get the same message. No seats available. Hello? This is a 30,000+ seat stadium. How the hell did they manage to sell out all 4 people groupings in 30 minutes?

So I tried again. For 2 seats this time. Another 8 minute wait on deck. Same message, which is actually “sorry, no exact matches were found, but other tickets may still be available”. I am not amused.

Sure, tickets are available. Just not on Ticketmadter. You can get lots of seats on ticket broker sites. 68-99$ tickets are being offered for between 200-2500$ USD. The neighbours budget doesn’t stretch that far!

Ticketmaster continues to disappoint. And the neighbour’s birthday gift plans are up in smoke…

I think I’ll go back to bed.

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