This is about the the finer details that really matter. Like Muji 0.38mm pens, savoury porridge, well-functioning ticket buying systems, and strategies for avoiding plane food.
First up, something that has been pissing me off for months. If you were (a) sentient and (b) planning on being in New York in April, you probably spent several hours from 5pm GMT (12pm EST) on Wednesday, 22nd February, 2012 trying to buy tickets for Kraftwerk's 8-night show at MOMA. You set an alarm, cued your web browser to the URL of the ticket agent to whom MOMA had outsourced the job, and, when the fateful moment came, heart pounding, clicked.
A few moments later, and you were delighted to find yourself waiting in a queue for tickets. A few more anxious moments, and you found yourself with a choice of days and albums. You weren't an idiot, though, and so had antecedently made your choice: the nostalgia of Autobahn, the climax of Tour de France, or the probability-maximising Techno Pop. Whatever. You clicked, joyful, already wondering whether you liked any of your friends enough to take as a guest, and then...It's all fucked. Webpage crashed, server down, so-called "queue" in shambles. You're a fighter though, so start the process again. Same thing happens. And again. A veritable eternal recurrence of hope, disappointment, and furious cursing. Several hours later, your only consolation is that everyone is having the same problem you are, and you realise you never liked Kraftwerk that much anyway. Yeah, fuck Kraftwerk.
And fuck MOMA. I mean, we're talking about a serious cultural event at a serious cultural institution. This isn't a Justin Timberlake concert at the O2 arena (for the record, I've been to a JT concert at the O2, and it was awesome...it's just not the same thing). What were Kraftwerk/MOMA thinking in setting up a shambolic ticket-selling system? Two possibilities:
(1) They knew that this was going to happen, and just didn't care. In fact, they wanted it to happen. They wanted the mass disappointment, the in-group/out-group hype, the media coverage. If this is true, I'm disgusted, and you should be too.
(2) They just didn't think about it, and did what everyone does when it comes to selling tickets, viz. outsourcing to some inadequate corporate entity without enough server space to upload a goldfish's memoirs.
Let's assume that (2) is correct, viz. that Kraftwerk/MOMA aren't sadists but instead just fools. What should they have done differently? Here's what: A LOTTERY SYSTEM.
The idea is simple. Everyone who wants to go hear Kraftwerk play at MOMA puts his or her name in for tickets, say by filling out a form on the MOMA website or sending an email to a designated email address. MOMA does a lottery, and the lucky names are informed. The unlucky fans are disappointed, but not furious. No Nietzschean awfulness. And it doesn't give preferential treatment to people like me, who don't have real jobs and can afford to sit at their computers for hours refreshing and yelling.
A lottery system is a bit tougher to set up when preferences aren't simply binary, i.e. when there are choices about seats or days. But not that much tougher. You just ask people to rank their preferences, including all and only those options that they want, and do cycled lotteries. Or you rank lottery winners in order of the draw and allow them to choose their tickets from what is available. No doubt more work for MOMA, but frankly cultural institutions that are interested in serving the public and not merely making money should think seriously about how they treat their customers.
Incidentally, while KRAFTWERK and MOMA aren't going to take anything I've said here on board, you can. Next time you send out an email to a listserve offering "first come, first served" on something cool--extra tickets to Glyndebourne, your banjo--consider using a mini-lottery system instead. Say that you'll wait for 24 hours to get all responses, and then choose a 'winner' at random. Otherwise you're just giving preferential treatment to the fuckers with iphones. Like me.
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