As you spring out of bed at 5 a.m. in the morning, only one thought takes center stage in your already crammed head. That would be securing a coveted ticket to your favorite artist Noah Kahan’s concert. Yes, tickets do not go on sale for another two hours, but you need to be prepared for the upcoming battle.
While you wish you could sit in bed all day with an army of electronics at your beck and call, Mom is already yelling at you to leave the house for school.
As you trudge up the ramp from the student parking lot, you pull off your first magic trick of the day: attempting to balance an open computer on top of your three inch binder while simultaneously refreshing your email for the presale link from Ticketmaster. You do not realize when your friends call out to you to say good morning, and you knock into people, your screen suffering from a multitude of near-death experiences.
During first period, the presale link finally comes through. You frantically click on the link, determined to at least be the 30,000th person in line, while your teacher rambles on about trigonometric identities. SOH-CAH-TOA, as vital as it is to Integrated Math 3 and beyond, stands no chance at stealing your attention away from the unmoving queue in front of you.
Your next period is physics, and lucky for you, that hallway is known to have the worst internet connection at school. Before you even sit down, Ticketmaster glitches for the first time, moving you back to 100,000th in the queue. Forget acceleration, you will need divine intervention to keep your spot in line. Your computer continues to glitch, and despite your once-trusty device’s frequent crash-outs, you are somehow able to maintain both your composure and focus.
Fortunately, you are not the only recruit in your platoon. Your sister, your brother, your mom, your dad, your uncle, your second removed cousin and even your cat and dog are in the trenches with you as well. They stare blankly at their screens, afraid to look away in the case that Ticketmaster somehow hears their desperate pleas and allows them to enter the hellspace that is finding seats and checking out quick enough.
Next to you, your friend who is a teacher’s assistant in your physics class is somehow 130th in the queue, despite joining the presale an hour late. At this point, it feels like Ticketmaster has a personal vendetta against you.
Your last period of the day is history, and despite its normal fun, all you can think about is the ensuing battle with the infinite robots on Ticketmaster. That is, if you can even make it to the stage of selecting seats. Now more than ever, you wish you had ten hands. You would have enough to both select seats at sonic speed and take derailed notes on the “TYRANNY,” as Chris Drake would say, leading up the American Revolution.
As you trek back to your car after the bell rings, you curse the Ticketmaster god’s cruelty. You slump into the driver’s seat, and Tickemaster once again glitches, launching you to the first in the queue. The birds outside sing your praises, and the clouds in the skies seem to disappear altogether. As you finally pick your seats and check out, your fingers flying on the keyboard to enter credit card information.
You did it!
But wait, you did not do it. Those tickets are already sold, and there is only one seat left, despite the fact that there was one hundred available seconds before. Somehow, the horrid school WiFi follows you whenever you go, and Ticketmaster once again glitches. This time, it puts you all the way back in the queue. Just like that, you have lost the war to a 5 year old who cannot even sing the songs correctly. You lost to robot warriors who sell tickets at three times the price.
As you drive home, you mourn the loss of the best night ever, tears streaming down your face as Sabrina Carpenter’s “Espresso” plays in the background. Your computer lays discarded in the back of your car, a clear purple heart winner.
Do not worry, you will get tickets in ten years when Khan decides to tour again … hopefully.
