Corporate Hippies

So, once again it comes around, the almost-annual Glastonbury ticket shambles: music-lovers, hippies of all ages and well-stocked drug dealers all converge on the internet in a frenzied attempt to hand over hundreds of pounds to a cunning farmer and his family.

This totally unexpected (yeah, right) demand causes the systems vending the tickets to collapse immediately. You know, just like Amazon and Ebay do every day, when people try to buy things from them.

All around the country, people frantically refresh and redial, only to be met by blank screens and hold music. The tension is upped by Twitter messages announcing that a third, then two thirds, of the fucking tickets are already gone. "Quick sheep, hit refresh faster! Faster!"

The proceedings are finally brought to a close by pretendy-hippie Emily Eavis, chirpily telling the frantic, helpless, largely ticketless masses, that she's very pleased to have sold out in record time, and that..

"..we genuinely try to make the ticket system as fair as it can be.."

What the fuck? How's that work, Emily? How is it fair?

Is it 'fair' that the ticket sales monopoly is given to one company, one website, so that we can't choose to go with the fastest, most responsive, easiest to use? Or even with one who can keep their website running for more than a few minutes?

Is it 'fair' that a chunk of tickets were allocated to a coach company to bundle with wildly overpriced coach seats, useful only to those able to get their tent and all their luggage to a coach station in the middle of a large town?

Is it 'fair' that people are allowed to buy tickets for other people - any other people - so all the Facebook monkeys can enter into reciprocal purchase agreements with complete fucking strangers, even in other countries, getting multiple bites at the same cherry? 

Not really, is it?

And then the hideous icing on the putrid cake? SEE tickets' - the sole ticket provider in this rigged election - posting on Facebook and Twitter a sarcastic little response to all those who'd had the temerity to criticise their websites fucking woeful performance. This after the first half hour was a write-off, and the next hour was a total fucking shambles of timed-out connections and "page unavailable"s :

"And thanks again for all the advice. Never knew we had so many IT consultants following us" 

Yeah? Fuck you, SEE tickets. You didn't invest in sufficient capacity because you didn't need to. No matter how slowly things ran, how many times people got timed-out or lost their sessions, you were always going to sell all the tickets, because you had a monopoly on them. So you were always going to get your hands on the whole of your slice of an abso-fucking-lutely massive pie, weren't you?

Is any of this fair, Emily? Is it fuck.

UPDATE: Apparently, its going to be Fleetwood Mac, Daft Punk and Depeche Mode headlining. Phew; none of the above matters after all...