Here’s a quick complaint about online ticket purchasing for highly popular events: it has a long way to go. Unable (and, by principle, unwilling) to camp out all night for post-season Yankees tickets, I decided to try and make an online purchase yesterday when tickets to the division and league championship series went on sale right at 12:30p sharp. I set an alarm on my computer to remind me to log in at the appointed time, and I was pleased to be able to secure a spot in the virtual queue right away — especially knowing that probably tens of thousands of other fans were trying to do the same thing either online, at Ticketmaster outlets, or at the stadium.

Buy Online, It’s Easy!

At first, the system indicated that I would have to wait five minutes, but then it fluctuated, first jumping to eleven minutes, then back to two minutes, then to five minutes again, etc. Clearly, there were some bugs already, and it was stressing me out, as I was due to leave for a business meeting in midtown Manhattan at 12:45p.

At around 12:37p, I was able to initiate a transaction to actually buy a block of four seats for a prospective Yankees appearance in the American League Championship Series. There was really no seat selection process, because the incredible demand pretty much meant that I would take whatever seats the system offered up. There were several forms to fill out, and each was timed — bold text at the top of each page told me that I had 2 minutes to fill out each form or forfeit my chance at the tickets altogether. Ugh.

No Result

The worst of it was that, after frantically filling out all those forms and submitting my credit card information, the system choked on my order. I got back a message that said, “There was a problem processing your request. We apologize for any inconvenience.” This was around 12:45p, and with my partners ready to walk out the door to our meeting, I had to basically give up, having successfully purchased nothing. Thanks, Yankees.com!