Goin to The Dead!

I just want to say how friggin excited I am to have been able to get my hands on tickets during the pre-sale yesterday for The Dead's show at the Rosemont Horizon (It will always be the Rosemont to me). That being said, I do have to mention what a frustrating ordeal it was to get those tickets. Now mind you, I would jump through schwag and high bong water to go to another Dead show, especially considering the line-up on this one (Phil, Bobby, Mickey, Billy, keyboardist Jeff Chimenti from Ratdog, and Warren Haynes aka the baddest ass mofo on six strings!), but there's no excuse for how poor the website that was "handling" the ticket purchase trully is.

Pre-sale started at 11am central time. I, like many many deadheads out there, were online and ready to go. I full well knew that it wouldn't be a very speedy process, but what happened was just obsurd. As soon as the clock struck 11 it was off to the races. Scroll down to the proper show, click purchase tickets, wait, wait, wait, accept terms and conditions, wait, wait ,wait. I'd keep writing wait at this point to show you how slow it was, but honestly, it'd fill up the entire blog. My screen was waiting to connect with the next page for an hour and 15 minutes! I kid you not. An hour and 15 fucking minutes!

I have a buddy in Boulder who was doing the same thing for the Denver show two days following ours. He and I kept texting each other to see if either one of our attempts were successful. Nope. He, like his other friends in the same bowl as us were all stuck at the same spot as well. So, I shot my older brother an e-mail to see how he was coming along out in San Francisco shooting for Shoreline tickets. Shoreline, by the way, may be the best spot to see a Dead show. He was also stuck. The shitty thing is that my brother's web development company bid on the new Dead website a few years ago. He offered a kick ass site that was pleasing to the senses, easy to navigate, and held smooth transactions using the latest and gratest. He didn't get the gig due to nepatism at it's finest. The winning bidder happens to be the son of one of GDP's executives. Look where that got us......STUCK ON THE FUCKING TERMS AND CONDITIONS PAGE!!!!!

So, after an hour and 15 minutes my buddy in Boulder finally got through. From that point it took him another 20 minutes to finalize his transaction due to the fact that the letter verifier wouldn't produce any verifaction letters. As he's trying to get past that toke, my older brother got through to the same spot. At the same time, I get kicked out of the website completely.

At this point, I'm pissed out of my gourds! I wasn't about to give up, but at the same time I felt like GDP owed me something for my time. I'll accept a big fat hairy bowl. I started over and hoped for the best. This time it "only" took about 5 minutes to load each new page. But, things were moving and I started to feel a little more at ease.

I got through to the billing and shipping address page when I hit the next snag. I started to fill out the boxes of personal info only to find out that there were no boxes next to the City and State fields. What? How the fuck am I gonna be able to complete my info? On top of that, none of the icons loaded, just red x's so that I couldn't read what button was what. I couldn't believe it! I called my buddy in Boulder and asked him how he got through that page. Appearently one of the icon's is a drag down for City and State. Since I couldn't read into the x's any deeper than face value I had to take a chance on one of them and go for broke. Here it goes.........

Finally, I was able to purchase my tickets. What a pain in the ass! Whomever that fucker is that put together the site should be deprived of every single show The Dead play this tour. I think that's a reasonable punishment for putting all of us innocent, loyal Deadheads through such a frustrating, maddening, needing a huge hit to calm down website interaction.

Bottom line is that I'm going back to the place where I saw The Dead play every spring and fall throughout my long-haired huge sideburn teenage years where a bong hit was my breakfast. In hindsight, I'd do it all again to get my hands on those tickets. A moment of silence for Jerry.........