Chicagoist Strikes Out Again with Tickets
By Benjy Lipsman in News on Oct 19, 2005 9:33PM
We voiced our frustration a couple weeks ago at the difficulties in trying to get ALCS tickets through TicketBastard. From the comments our readers left, we saw we weren't the only one that had issues with the online ticketing.
Yesterday, tickets went on sale for the World Series and things were even worse! Chicagoist had two computers and the phone working at work and our girlfriend doing the same. We even tried old standby tricks like calling out-of-state TicketMaster phone numbers. All lines were busy, even in Fargo and Akron.
Other Chicagoists had no luck either. Complaints of proxy errors, stalled security word image loading and other issues conspired against anyone trying to get tickets. Did any of our readers get tickets? We want to know!
One of our readers passed on her experiences with TicketMaster's site yesterday, more heart-breaking than most because of how far into the process she got before problems arose:
I typed in my word correctly and it found two tickets for me. I selected the tickets and said that I would like to print my tickets on my printer. It then brought up a page that said I had one minute to fill in the following info. The page took forever to load but I finally got it. I typed in everything it asked for in about 15 seconds and clicked on continue. It then told me that I took too long and my tickets have been released, sorry for the inconvenience...
Perhaps it's not so unfathomable that nobody seemed to get tickets. While over 130,000 crowded into the online waiting room looking for tickets, there were only only 2000-4000 tickets available per game to the general public! So even were technology functioning properly, chances were slim of snagging any of those coveted seats.
Maybe we wouldn't all be so pissed off is the system had the perception of everybody having an equal chance at getting seats. Is that asking too much? Chicagoist doesn't think so.
We remember the old days of lining up at Blockbuster Music or Carson's for Bulls playoff tickets -- drawing numbers out of a bucket and then anxiously waiting to see whether our number was close enough to possibly get seats. Sometimes we won, sometimes we lost out but at least we felt we had a chance. We wondered why there couldn't be some sort of online lottery, where there's a few days to register and submit ticket requests, then tickets are distributed at a certain time. Seems like such a system is feasible. Seems like it could work. And if fact, that's just about how the Astros sold their World Series tickets!
Image via CBS 2