Being Modern: Online ticketing
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Your support makes all the difference.We've all been there: poised, keenly bleary eyed at 6am as the tickets go on sale, ready to choose which price band we want, tap in our details and hey, presto, we're pretty sure we've just got tickets for the next big game/gig/ athletics meeting (hmm, 2012, don't know which meet that might be...).
Pretty sure because the compute is juuuuust taking a shooort while to confirm. Come on, come on, swirling beachball of doom, we don't want to see you any more. Don't time out, don't time out, don't ti... GAH!
OK, so there's a lot of other people trying to buy tickets at the same time. That's fair: it is, after all, Take That's comeback tour/the FA Cup Final/the flippin' Olympics, for goodness' sake – you'd have thought they'd buy enough bandwidth for the site not to go down!
It didn't go down, of course; it's just that your connection failed. Fine, log on again (if you can remember that eight-character password you made up 10 minutes ago – must have at least two numerals and at least one cap for reasons unknown). And the price bracket/event you wanted is sold out.
So, it's either stump up the extra wonga (£750 to watch some men dash around a circle in 20 seconds, then feel a bit bereft/light in the pocket afterwards), go and see the underwater three-day eventing, which is mysteriously still available, or rely on the touts. And the last person you should ever rely on is a tout. Unless you're relying on being ripped off.
And for those of us lucky enough to get our hands on the tickets we do want, there is, naturally, the obligatory administration payment to be made, too. Being Modern knows of at least one football club that adds on £2.50 per ticket if they are bought with a credit or debit card either online or via the phone. It also stipulates that tickets, for some reason, cannot be bought at the box office – so there really is no choice but to pay with a card. Ooh, you cheeky so-and-so's, you little rapscallions; you almost make the touts seem worth a go...
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