Billy Joel at Fenway went on sale this morning at 10 am so, at 9:45, I entered the "virtual waiting room." For those unfamiliar with how the VWR works, everybody who logs on to buy tickets gets put there and they randomly select people to move out of the waiting room and into the buying process. Fair enough, if everyone buys at once, the site will crash. Random is a good way to do it.

Luck was with me today. The second that the tickets went on sale, I won the VWR lottery and got sent to the screen to buy tickets. It took me about four seconds to hit two tickets, best available. And nothing was available. Anywhere in Fenway. I figured that I might have hit the wrong button so I did it again. Still nothing. So I tried searching for one ticket anywhere in Fenway. Gone. Kept trying for the next half hour. Nothing.

I called the ticket office and got through to them at 10:30. No, they had no tickets. I asked how it was possible that I had gotten in right away and still couldn't get tickets and she told me, oh, there must have been a lot of people trying to get them.

There's no way that 10,000 people hit those two buttons faster than I did. Heck, I can't even imagine they let more than a few thousand out of the VWR every few seconds.

Not surprisingly, though, there are thousands of actual tickets (not "guaranteed delivery," real seats with row and seat numbers) for sale on reseller sites.

I'm assuming that there are a lot of people writing scripts to buy up tickets as fast as possible. So frustrating.

Mike