VANOC TICKET FAIL - making the most of the day

We were carefully aware of Saturday, November 7's approach, the day was circled on our calendar. At 9:45 AM we stopped all our morning activities and both waited anxiously at the computer as the last 15 minutes to 10AM ticked away. At 9:55 AM, 5 minutes before the start of the final opportunity to purchase Olympic tickets, we started trying to login to our previously-setup online Olympic ticket purchasing account. Finally, the time was upon us. 10 AM. We tried to login, and...the server was busy !

The error message on the computer screen told us to try again later. We interpreted "later" as meaning "right away". And tried again. And again. And again. At 10:30 AM we were still continually trying to login to our account where we could buy tickets. Finally, at 10:38 we got through. Mind you, not all was right - the page was basic HTML, but we didn't care - we could still navigate to the ticket search area. We found the event we wanted (Women's hockey - Canada vs. Sweden - $25/ticket). Almost there! We clicked the tickets and - ... - loading - ... - Error message - the page cannot be found. Crap! Click back - can't do that. Click reload - are you sure you want to reload? - yes - wait..wait.. Error message screen - server is busy. Now it's 10:44 and we've been booted out of the system.

But we're not going to give up. We keep trying to login - server busy error page. At 11:10, I realize there's a phone number to call if you want to book over the phone. I try calling - busy signal. Redial - busy signal. Try calling the hearing impaired number - busy. To optimize our chances, Sara works the computer retrying continually, and I work the phone lines. At 11:30, we switch roles to keep things interesting. At 11:55 - two hours since we started - we're mentally losing steam. At 12:30 - hallelujah - Sara gets through on the phone - it's ringing!! An automated voice informs her that the office is currently closed, and is open on Saturdays from 9AM - 4PM (which means it should be open!!). That was the last straw. We decided to get on with our day.

We had wasted 3 hours of our Saturday NOT getting Olympic tickets. The morning was over. The weekend felt like to was zooming by. What a disaster.

Luckily, the next 9 hours turned out to be really fun and felt long, so by Saturday night we'd felt like it had been a long weekend. After the Olympic ordeal, we ate some lunch and went to pick up some groceries - I wanted to pick up some items to make some home made pasta sauce.

My meat sauce with some spaghetti - a rare cooking venture for me - turned out to be delicious. It was really easy to make too - I'd say the whole dinner took about 35 minutes to prepare - and we had most of the ingredients already: italian sausage, crushed canned tomatoes, onion, garlic, oregano, basil, red wine, and olive oil.

After dinner, we bussed over the UBC Hockey Arena to watch a game - UBC Thunderbirds vs. University of Alberta Bears. It's the same place that the Olympic Women's Hockey game we want to see will take place. Tickets to the UBC game cost $10 each and the game was fun to watch. It went from 7:30pm to 9:30.

Saturday turned out to be a great day, even if we don't have our Olympic tickets. (Turns out the whole ticket system was a bust and VANOC has postponed the sell date until next weekend! We have to go through the whole thing again, but at least we still have a chance to get our hands on some tickets)


-Rob