My cousin and I began planning a vacation for reading week (that's spring break for all you party-ers down in the USA) coming up in February. Where to, you ask? Well, the Vancouver 2010 Olympics, of course! And tickets were going on sale this weekend! We had it all planned out... fly out on Friday evening, after class. Stay at his friends' place for the week, and fly back on Monday more than a week after arriving. We'd see the men's snowboard halfpipe finals at Cyprus Mountain and the men's Canada/USA hockey game, hit up a couple victory ceremonies (with concerts afterwards) and fill the rest of our week with local Olympic celebrations. It was shaing up to be an epic week.
Then, we realize, plane tickets to Vancouver on Friday are about $150 more than they are to fly out on Monday. Okay, so we'll leave on the 15th instead of the 13th, not a big deal. It'd still be a week in VanCity.
We got our hands on a Visa card (proud supporter of the Vancouver 2010 winter olympics, and the only payment card accepted by the olympics as a result), and were all set up to input the required information to our account last night. To our surprise, the website had been changed in preparation for today's ticket sales. You could no longer log in, their "fair" system had been implemented.
This is how the system works. You go to buy tickets, you get put in a waiting room. The page automatically refreshes itself every 30 seconds, to save you from having to do it. Upon refreshing, the program behind this allegedly chooses, randomly, whether you go through to buy tickets or if you remain in the waiting room for another go around. Then once you get through, you have 12 minutes to make your transaction. This process was intended to give all Canadians a fair chance at buying tickets. However, this was the farthest from fair that you could have possibly gotten.
I opened my browser a short while before the 11am (10am pacific time), and waited excitedly in anticipation of buying the tickets for our epic week. The first hour passed by, then the second, and third. And I watched as the updates of ticket sales were posted. Men's CAN/USA hockey game - sold. Okay, I guess we can find another. About an hour and a half in, men's snowboard halfpipe sold out... okay, we can hit up the women's, it's not a big deal. 2.5 hours in, women's snowboarding sold out. 3.5 hours in, everything but hockey, curling, and victory ceremonies were sold out. A little more than SIX hours after ticket sales began, I left the room for five minutes. I came back to find I had finally been "randomly" selected to buy tickets.
Awesome.
No, not awesome. The end result? A Germany/Belarus hockey game, and men's curling. Have I mentioned that I do not like curling? And perhaps I'm a bad Canadian, but I'm not all that big on hockey, either. I only wanted to see Canada face the USA. But instead, I dropped a lot of money on two sports that I didn't care to see. Two victory ceremonies are also on our list... atleast I'll get to see them award the men's halfpipe winner... and two concerts.
This has become an epic fail.
It's like fake snow on Christmas day... looks like the real thing, gives you a white Christmas, but it's just not quite the same.
BTW, to the not so smart coordinators of the 2010 Olympic ticket sales... FAIR would have been this:
limit ticket amounts per person
limit time allowed for transaction.
DO NOT "randomly" assign people to purchase tickets. Those who were there at 10am should get their tickets before those who showed up a 1pm and got through after five minutes.
DO allow people in in the order in which they arrived. Put through however many people at a time, once they finish up, put through the next round of people, in the ORDER IN WHICH THEY ARRIVED. It is NOT fair to make someone wait 6 hours when they were there at opening, and have those who showed up well after opening go through before them. First-come-first-serve (as was stated on the website) is FIRST come, FIRST serve. If they dawdle along and don't get there in time to buy tickets, it's their problem... but if someone who was there on time DOESN'T get the tickets they want because you ASSHATS had a program "randomly" assigning people to the waiting room, that is NOT fair.
And on another note, there is nothing "random" about this program. It is a statistical improbability that with a 50/50 chance of 'waiting room' or 'tickets' anyone would get 700 'waiting room' assignments in a row. The probability of this is so small, you wouldn't be able to find it on the standard normal curve.
