Take one hugely popular music festival:
– hype liberally prior to ticket sales commencing
– announce Oasis as headline act
– run a booking system on a hopelessly inadequate OS for the purpose (Win2K)
– use a hopelessly poor web server (IIS 5.0)
– write your booking management code in ASP
– have only 100 phone lines open
– sit back and wait for chaos to happen
At 7.59 pm last night, I clicked refresh and up popped the Glastonbury booking link for the first time, by 8.06 with my details entered, Sally and I had our Glastonbury tickets (and even a confirmation email 10 minutes later). “Great”, I thought. “This is going to be easy…”
Wrong!
Waiting patiently with her debit card to use the computer after us (2 ticket limit per order you see) was our friend Sally.
We participated in the great Glasto booking service human denial of service attack for over 8 hours (I dropped out at 2.30am to go to bed), with no luck. As far as I know out of our friends only Sally, myself, Rob and Claire have tickets. Everyone else has been up all night trying.
Fantastic Mr Eavis. After last year’s debacle, you really sorted out an efficient booking system. It almost makes you want to buy tickets off the touts–I bet they managed to get them with no problems.
UPDATE: According to NME.com, Emily Eavis says: “The phone lines are working really well. Keep trying. We’ve sold 60,000. They’re going at a rate of about 100 per minute. But please keep trying. Nothing has crashed. Don’t worry. There’s nothing that’s not working and everything’s running well.”
Er. No, I don’t think so…