no joy in rockville

here's my column from yesterday.
so sad.

CARPE DIEM 10-27

There was no joy in Rockville today.

Well, there was joy for a few, but there were a lot more potential Rockies World Series ticket buyers who were joyless. Not only joyless, but disappointed, upset, furious, frustrated, livid, enraged, infuriated and incensed.

For not one but two days, people trying to score a ticket to see the Rocks play in their first World Series sat in front of computers that gave them the message that is burned into thousands of pairs of eyeballs across the state: “Our servers are experiencing extremely heavy loads right now. Do not refresh this page or you will be dropped to the end of the line.” The main difference between Monday’s aborted ticket sale and Tuesday’s was that the countdown timer on that screen was changed from 60 seconds to 120.

And according to tech experts, the message that screen bore was untrue; a University of Denver computer science professor told the Denver Post that the javascript code used on the page is unable to keep track of when an individual computer first attempted to log in. It was a ruse to discourage people from re-attempting to connect with the Rockies’ servers over and over.

Of course, there’s no real good way to sell the 17,000 to 18,000 tickets that were available for each game to a potential pool of millions of buyers. Systems like lotteries, or standing in line for days favor those who live close to the stadium—and don’t have anything better to do for a couple of days. These old-fashioned systems are also easily gamed by scalpers and ticket brokers.

So computers are the answer, right? Not that I or anyone else should really have assumed that it would be easy to get tickets—although news reports are filled with photos of sad-eyed, disappointed fans who seemed to be working under the delusion that just because they wanted tickets they should have been able to get them.

The real problem was in the Rockies’ computer system allowing potential buyers a glimmer of hope, then washing those dreams away in the form of a frozen web page.

I’m one of what sounds like many would-be World Series attendees who somehow, miraculously got past the “sit there and wait, you putz” screen and onto the actual ticket sales server at one point. I actually had four tickets selected for Sunday’s game, right field lower level, and had all my information entered into the system. I imagine myself telling the seeming tall tale in bars as I edge into my senile years, spouting off to anyone who will listen about the day I nearly scored World Series tickets:

“The computer even called me by name! I tell you, it’s true! The screen said, ‘Welcome, Kurt Brighton!’ with a little exclamation point and everything, as if to say, ‘Oh happy day for you! For you are one of the elect—you are one of us, part of Rockies Nation. Welcome!’ Imagine my elation…”

Welcome indeed.

Alas, it wasn’t to be. Once I got past entering my credit card information, a screen—a painfully, brutally slow screen came up asking me to confirm the info—and promptly locked up before it actually finished loading. So, I’m looking at a screen that says to confirm, but the buttons that allow you to confirm never loaded.

Confirm?? How?!? What do I do? Yell at the screen? (I did.) Punch the screen? (I almost did.) And since the computer geniuses who set up the Rockies’ system arranged it so that buyers timed out after five minutes to prevent—what, exactly?—it was all over by then anyway. The Post reported on a Denver attorney who was so angry about a similar situation that he made screen captures of the seats he “had” and faxed them to the Rockies ticket office, claiming they had a legal contract. He may sue the organization.

I do wish him luck. And I understand where he is coming from. To be that close, thinking it was a done deal, and then be denied—well.

I’ll be the weird old guy at the end of the bar if you ever want to hear the story.

The Mighty K has struck out.

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