[Slowhand] NZ Ticketing Woes (with a happy ending)

[JP Hansen]

Regarding NZ ticket sales; 


> 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.


A friend and I tried for an hour, but as said above, the thing had 
crashed properly, or only parts of pages would load (ie, enter your 
email address, but no box for password or 'submit'. Jumping down a 
directory or two would bring up the whole directory contents.In short 
the site was a broken shambles basically.

We figured everyone was experiencing the same problems, and the 
ticket sales 0800 number was always busy. So I left my friend to keep 
trying online and I drove to my local Ticketmaster outlet (a sports 
shop) as I'd noticed that they were resellers although there was no 
notice to that effect the day prior. Got there at 1:15, walked in, 
the place was deserted. Told someone I wanted to by tickets and they 
said the ticket counter wasn't staffed, and wandered off. I thought 
to get help. Eventually he wandered back and ignored me (by now a 2nd 
guy had arrived looking for Clapton  tickets). 

Anyway, finally when she'd stopped serving an existing customer the 
sole sales clerk came over to us, fired up the monochrome monitor, 
got this thing that looked like it ran on DOS booted up and asked 
what show I was after. 

I said Eric Clapton and got a blank look back. Ulp! The guy behind 
said 'Mission Estate concert'. Tap tap tap, 2 minutes later I walk 
out with 4 GA tickets in my hand (my budget doesn't stretch to 
reserved seating sadly). So 10 minutes in the store, and pretty plain 
sailing compared to trying the website.

I noticed that the site finally came back online by 4pm, and a sold-
out notice was up by 4:15.

This story;

http://www.stuff.co.nz/stuff/0,2106,3706666a1860,00.html

says "Mission Concert devotees took just four hours to snap up the 
25,000 tickets for Eric Clapton's show" 

Yes, well, four and a quarter hours, and the site was down for four 
of them! 

Anyway, gonna be seeing Clapton once again in New Zealand, something 
I had seriously doubted would ever happen. 

Happy! 
JP