1 April 2007
The Road to Glastonbury
(Times are approximate...)
07:00 Got my Google Calendar SMS reminder to buy tickets for Glastonbury Festival
07:50 Got out of bed and had a shower
08:20 Checked my emails and the GlastonburyFestivals.co.uk website to see what I should be doing
08:40 Visited the Seetickets.com website only to get redirected to busy.seetickets.com by their load-balancing software
08:50 Setup two laptops and distributed the URLs and phone numbers to Suzy and Jo
09:00 Started to reload the web pages and constantly redial the phone numbers
09:05 Noticed that even busy.seetickets.com wasn’t able to cope with the number of visitors
09:10 Started thinking of ways to buy tickets via back-door methods, including doing reverse lookups and trying different aliases for the seetickets.com domain and server (some of which even worked!)
10:30 Found lots of blogs with posts by smug bastards saying they’d secured tickets after 30 minutes of trying, including one that claimed he’d got a more direct link to the order page from eFestivals.co.uk
10:31 Cursed all those smug bastards for a while
10:40 Registered on the Festival Forums to find that goddamn link and alternative phone numbers! (Turns out it was just another alias which I’d not tried, so felt a little pleased that I was on the right track!)
10:45 Standard (non-coach package) tickets SOLD OUT but not really bovvered cos we wanted coach tickets anyway!
10:46 More frequent reloading of the coach ticket sales web page and constant redialling of all the phone numbers we could find
11:10 Web page loaded, details entered, checked and double-checked (although slightly shocked by the fact that the coach departs on the Wednesday and returns on the Monday!)
11:15 FOUR TICKETS PURCHASED! I’M GOING TO GLASTONBURY!!!
22:43 Still waiting for the email confirmation, which may take up to 24 hours apparently... although that still doesn’t stop the paranoia that something went wrong with the transaction and we’ve not actually got the tickets!
Update: 2 April 2007 (18:10)
Don’t panic... I received my confirmation email at around 08:29 this morning!
Having read a few forums, blogs and all these comments on the BBC website, it seems that some people got through in minutes without any problems whilst others had several PCs and phones going for hours (like us) and yet still didn’t manage to get tickets. With 400,000 people having pre-registered their details and most probably having several PCs and phone lines trying to get through to bag one of the 137,500 tickets, it’s no surprise that phone lines were jammed and the websites couldn’t cope!
So could this have been handled more efficiently? Should they have had more phone lines open? Should they have had more web servers? Would a lottery be a better, fairer way to allocate the tickets?
Personally, I think that what happened today was a lottery anyway. Whether or not you’ve managed to get Glastonbury tickets was mainly down to luck, and I think the wide variety of circumstances under which people were successful in getting their tickets proves this. Unfortunately, everyone who didn’t get tickets will say the system failed and it was unfair – but that will always be the case no matter how they are allocated.
2 Comments
Besides, with all your guitar practice lately, I thought you'd actually be headlining.
Enjoy
Phillip
