Virtual Waiting Room

It sounds like a scifi blunder, but the Virtual Waiting Room is a real thing, and it is an agony reserved for outsiders and insiders alike--all incarnations of Red Sox fans. The Red Sox ticketing nightmare in Massachusetts requires more than just one entry on this blog, so we'll just stick with the ticketing purgatory of the VWR. The demand for tickets is so incredible that there are lotteries over chances to purchase them for certain games, like Yankees games or opening day festivities. Regular tickets however, have no lottery. Instead, it's you vs all the ticketbrokers and their newfangled products. The web gets clogged when they go onsale, and I heard from an unverified source that Comcast and RCN (the local cable providers) rent nuclear-powered equipment from MIT in order to keep the entire interweb from hitting a giant 404 error.

When tickets go on sale, you have four options, each bleaker than the last.

• Dial their 800 number, which gets so busy it may not even connect to get the busy signal. This will take hours.
• Go online and visit the Virtual Waiting Room. It's a page that automatically refreshes every 30 seconds in case you can advance in line. If you open one internet window (no tabs, etc) and responsibly wait by your computer for each 30 second refresh, you will die of dehydration in 48 hours and sometime after your death you'll advance in line only to find out that everything's been sold out.
  • You can also open as many tabs as you can fit on your screen. Don't lose heart, but it's still going to be at best an hour or two before you advance. Can you stand sentry over 80 tabs for that long?
• While you're waiting, you can go onto craigslist or ebay and see that people are getting in somehow and immediately selling their wares for a profit. It's pretty sickening for an honest RS fan.
• Skip it and see a minor league game. (This secondary market, you may be surprised, also gets sold out.)
  

The last option of course is like a trick question. If you skip it, then you don't really love the Sox, because the Sox are all about suffering, and even though the Curse is now over, a Sox fan should seek out new and interesting ways to fail. The VWR fulfills this dream like no other fire sale can.