Were you like me on Friday, January 9th, waiting until the clock struck 1pm to buy a ticket to the inaugural parade using ticketmaster.com? And did you, like me, keep on entering the distorted text into the box only to see the screen telling you vaguely that “Sorry, no exact matches were found, but other tickets may be available.” Did you keep going back, hoping that maybe the intertubes were clogged and that the site was experiencing excessive demand which was slowing down the purchasing process? I must have entered text like this in the box several dozen times:

ticketmaster1

The computer was toying with us, people.  It turns out that 5,000 inaugural parade tickets were sold in less than a minute.

Remember HAL, the super-intelligent computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey? There’s a point where HAL starts giving Dave clever evasions to keep him from knowing exactly what is going on (basically, that HAL has taken over the spacecraft and is about to kill everyone).  Maybe I’m exaggerating, but tickets that sell out in less than a minute by a computer system that doesn’t tell you they are sold out comes dangerously close to HAL and needs to be unplugged.

Ok, I admit it, I’m just complaining that I didn’t get a ticket.  Did you get one?