[Slowhand] Re: Clapton playing New Zealand January 27 2007 (and Australia)

[Bryce Utting]

"sam mangano" <mangs88 at verizon.net> wrote:

> congrats to our suffering friends from down under, you FINALLY got your 

> wish.......


Yeah, if only: it was a complete bloody ballsup.

U2 had a concert scheduled for March (IIRC), that led to complete chaos 
when sales opened: web site all but unresponsive, phones busy, queues 
out the doors of retailers, retailers unable to produce tickets since 
they were dependent on the same fscking site... I was kinda worried we'd 
see the same thing, so I checked the site offering tickets, found it was 
an Apache server (unlike the U2 IIS lunacy), and figured come noon, when 
tickets went on sale, all would be well.

feh.

Come noon, the site promptly crashed.  Turned out the front end was just 
the venue site, and ticket requests were redirected to... Ticketmaster's 
IIS servers, the same outfit that screwed up last time.  Constant busy 
signal on the phone, and "Server busy" over the web.  oh CRAP.

Worked other phones, and found friends with tickets from the first 
offering (pre the announcement EC was playing)... all spoken for. 
checked the news wires, found a story boasting that "The website can 
process 10 tickets a second".  errr... if I were responsible for a 
ticket site for a big name event, and that was all the provision I 
offered, I'd expect to be fired for merely making the suggestion. 
bloody incompetence.  if EC's management want to slap this outfit silly 
like they deserve, they might just have to join the line...

Middle of the afternoon I somehow got a request through for 2 GA tickets 
(section starting 50m back from the stage).  not what I was hoping for, 
but hey.

Double-checked though just on 5pm, and wouldn't ya know it, my request 
for two reserved tickets was accepted!  section B4, way out next to the 
outer aisles.  still, only about 25m back from the stage, which is a 
hell of a lot closer than, say, Australia ;>

Immediately afterwards, the SOLD OUT signs went up.

So okay, for freaks like me: not quite a complete bloody ballsup.  but 
for everyone else: calls for lynchings are entirely in order.  fffffft.


butting

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