Buying Tickets at Admission.com...

99.9% of the time when you try to make a purchase online for "good" seats at a popular concert, you know you're in for a "Mission Impossible" (unless you have connections with the Bell Centre, which obviously I don't). The split-second the tickets go on sale, literally thousands of people clog the phone lines and web servers all at once. Usually the web page doesn't even load since the web traffic is so heavy; it's like a lottery to just to get the purchase page to load for you...

Just to give you an idea of the difficulty involved: One time we had four different PCs with each of us using multiple browers trying to buy tickets at the same time, and for our efforts we were rewarded with a "Server too busy" message.

Today, the guys lined up to get tickets for the 12:00pm sale, and were 8th in line, a pretty decent position in line. At my end, I had Firefox with six tabs going and two Internet Explorer browsers open, with the purchase page pre-loaded to save precious nanoseconds.

At 12:00pm I start clicking the "Buy tickets" button one after another, and as expected got only errors thrown back at me. At 12:08pm the guys in line were told all the floor seats for the show were sold out already...But, at exactly 12:05pm on the last browser, for the first time in my life, I got my web page to load on IE.

Once you achieve this tiny miracle, Admission.com is kind enough to threaten you by giving you only three minutes to complete the purchase, (or else they go back on sale). So, I put my mom's typing skills to work, and she starts filling out the online forms to buy the tix (remember every second counts here!).

I still couldn't believe it, I wasn't expecting a web page to load at all...I start freaking out, asking myself the obvious question, "Did they buy the tickets already?" I jumped on the phone, and after several exchanges of "Did you get it yet?" with Randy standing in line, I finally confirmed the seats: Row DD, that's right DD baby, Mission Impossible Possible...Cool.