Brain Stuck In Queue For 6 Hours Trying To Get Taylor Tickets

Tuesday was a first for me. I don't usually need to wait online for concert tickets. But it isn't every day that Taylor Swift concert tickets go on sale. Taylor hasn't toured in four years, so the demand for her Eras Tour was going to be insane. Yet somehow the sole purveyor of tickets to her shows simply wasn't ready.

My 14-year-old daughter Carly helped guide me through the ticket-buying process. First, we had to become "verified fans" on the Ticketmaster site. This is an effort to keep tickets out of the hands of scalpers and bots. Kudos Taylor, I agree with the move. Tickets go on sale to the public on the 18th but some verified fans got a special presale link and code to use yesterday, the 15th. We were lucky enough to get our code on Monday night. So yesterday morning at 9:30 a.m. I entered and began waiting.

At 10 a.m. you were moved from the waiting room into the queue. For many, that is as far as they made it yesterday. When I got put in the queue it immediately said that there were 2000+ people ahead of me in line for tickets. I thought fine, I can wait. But just a few minutes in I got a message that the queue had been paused. Paused? I knew what that meant. It meant Taylor had just crashed Ticketmaster. The site was down for several hours. Finally, after lunch, I was back in the queue and my wait continued.

I went home and kept checking the queue. 2000+ ahead of me. It remained that way for two more hours. Then, finally, I began to move my way up. 1,000 ahead of me. Then, just 350. Finally, it was my turn! I was going to buy Taylor tickets and score father-daughter points for the rest of my life! I got to a page where you had to enter the code you had been sent the previous night. I entered mine. It didn't work. I entered it again. Still didn't work. But I'd come so far! Then I accidentally refreshed my browser and was sent back to the queue! NOOOOOOO!

Fortunately, I sped back through the queue line and got back in to buy tickets. After attempting my code for what seemed to be the 10th and 11th times, it finally worked and I unlocked the Taylor Swift pre-sale for the show in Kansas City. This happened at approximately 4:10 p.m. Tuesday afternoon. I entered the waiting room that morning at 9:30 a.m. I'll admit that the process from there worked well. I was able to find decent tickets in my price range. I clicked purchase and finally got the message that I'd been waiting all day for.

My day ended in happy tears from my daughter. I realize that not everyone had the success I did. The internet was filled with horror stories of tickets nearly purchased only to be put back in the queue. Codes not working or saying that they'd already been used in the presale. The bottom line is that Ticketmaster should have seen all of this coming. How could they not anticipate that the demand for Taylor tickets would far exceed anything they'd seen in recent years?

Swifties have another chance to score tickets during another presale today and when they go on sale to the public on Friday. Hopefully, Ticketmaster has learned a thing or two in the past 24 hours. But I wouldn't bet on it.

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