Woohoo!
It took me an hour, two computers, 4 browsers, 3 credit cards and untold amounts of swearing, but I have finally managed to book 2 tickets to go see Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to the Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall, in October!
The show will be featuring a 72 piece symphony orchestra!
Katy is on the BB mailing list and was informed of a pre-registration seat sale for those who knew the magic word (that would be sent by email). It’s been an ordeal, let me tell you. The magical, mystical email was over a week late, but it finally came. The seat sale started today at noon, sharp. People had been advised to go to the Royal Albert ticketing website.
Which, at noon sharp, melted down.
It was chaos, I tell you. I was using both my laptop and desktop to try and get to the flippin’ form to book the tickets. Pages would timeout, the webserver would throw error pages left, right and center. At one point, I was informed that all the tickets had been already sold (about 5 minutes into the chaos). What probably happened is that tickets were reserved for a web session, but then the server failed and all the reservation locks weren’t reset and had to timeout. After about 30 minutes of swearing at both computers, I’d finally gotten to a point where I had 4 tickets in my shopping cart and was ready to checkout. After a few more tense minutes, I had finally gotten to a form where I entered my credit card details.
Except that it wouldn’t validate any of the 3 credit cards I tried, probably because the CC validation server was also melting down.
At which point I gave up and went on the phone. 30 minutes later, I had a woman with a lovely phone voice selling me 2 tickets in no time (and no hassle) at all. We’re 8 rows from the stage, so I should be able to get a good view of the show :)
This makes me happy.
I’ve now informed Katy that, even if she has to give birth at the show, we’re going. Hell, it’s going to be filmed for a DVD so it would probably make the bonus features :D