Lynah tickets vs. FL football ticket sales

We have the annual Lynah ticket line complaints/suggestions, and although that's months away, figured I'd post how the UFlorida football student ticket sales were done this year and its problems, for reference.

This year student tickets were allowed to be purchased ONLY by phone (an automated system...no one needed to man it). In the past, there was a line at the stadium (with people camping out weeks in advance), along with supplemental phone sales for those who didn't choose to wait in line. The university decided to go only to phone sales this year.

The phone lines were supposed to open at 8 PM on Friday, and be open daily from 5 AM-midnight. 96 phone lines were dedicated to it. 24 to accept and process orders and 72 to put people on hold until one of the 24 opened up (a "queue" in operations-speak, I guess).

The problem is that with 50,000 students (most of whom wanted tickets...remember this IS Florida afterall), 96 lines is nothing. People called for hours and hours and hours only to get busy signals. There's also an (unconfirmed; I haven't seen it "officially" report that thousands and thousands of calls at exactly 8 PM Friday caused the campus phone system to overload and go down for a while.

Some people claimed to have gotten through at 2 AM or other bizarre hours of the night (despite mailed information and web-posted info saying the lines would not be available from midnight-5 AM). This caused a mini-uproar. Additionally, for a while there was a phone message on the system on Saturday night stating "the ticket service is down for maintenance and will be next available 2 AM on Monday morning". After alot of people got through on Sunday, it became clear that the athletics dept. was again giving false information.

Tickets sold out Monday evening, leaving thousands of people who spent hours and hours dialing only to not get through ticketless. Seniority didn't matter here at all, nor "how big of a fan are you", but rather how fast and often you could hit redial (or get someone else to do it for you when you sleep).

So some of the messiness of Lynah lines does indeed suck. But I think it's preferable to The Swamp phone lines being...swamped (sorry, couldn't resist).

A sidenote here...each student can only order 1 set of tickets. The only exception is those who are married can order a 2nd set for their spouse...but ONLY if they FAX THEIR MARRIAGE CERTIFICATE to the ticket offices (I kid you not...)

(As for me, I spent upwards of 10 hours during the weekend dialing and redialing at all sorts of hours and never getting through. Finally I got through and put on hold at about 1:45 AM Monday, and ordered my ticket shortly thereafter. Yay. When Miami comes to Gainesville to kick Florida's ass, I'll be there...)

wow! this reminds me of course enroll!

wow! this reminds me of course enroll!

ahem, the *old* CoursEnroll, though it's a damn good analogy - though I guess if you graduated in '01 you haven't seen the new/improved one. I could give a long, boring explanation, but let's just say I've enrolled for all my courses within 10 minutes the past 2 times now.

Do they still have Grand Course Exchange in Barton Hall?

They've been working on getting Course Exchange/Add/Drop online too, but they've been working on that for, well, a while... so yup, it's still around, though I've never personally participated, so I can't reminisce with ya, JTW.