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The Story of Yesterday

The morning of Thursday, June 19th, 2008 sprang into being full of energy. The sun was straining to cast its beams beyond the restrictive clouds, so each ray of sunlight that escaped and struck Angell Street was particularly bright. This was the morning that face value Eagles tickets were to go on sale, a fact of which the universe was surely aware.

I had been preparing for this day since the ticket sale had been announced. The tickets normally sold out in minutes, and quick-fingered fans (as well as folks looking to make a quick buck, with tickets likely to go for well over a hundred percent markup on resale) often managed to secure holds on every ticket within seconds of the release. In order to secure my place among these quick-fingered fans, therefore, I had trained well, reading strategy and flexing my typing fingers. At nine o'clock ante meridian, an hour before the tickets were due for release, I updated my Ticketmaster account to reflect my current vital statistics. Shortly thereafter, I opened six tabs in two browsers: my first choice, the Ticketmaster page for the Eagles-Redskins game, open as tab number one in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, my second choice (the Falcons) open as tab number two both browsers, and the Thanksgiving game as my third-string option. Then came the hard part--waiting.

I closed out the bandwidth-snacking Gmail (for fear of an ill-timed auto-reload) and opened the U.S. Naval Observatory Master Clock Time. I reloaded each of my tabs periodically to ensure that I would not be somehow "timed out" before the appointed hour. I read snippets of bar study material, but was too jazzed to pay sufficient attention. Soon it was 9:52:05. Then it was 9:56:55. At 9:59:05 I closed out the Master Clock and began cyclically reloading my Ticketmaster pages. About a minute later I had reached the gateway to the promised land--both Mozilla and Internet Explorer pages showed tickets available for the Redskins game. Internet Explorer had proven slightly faster on my earlier reload experiments, so I input my request for two tickets, then advanced through the next screen by entering two random, skewed and distorted words in order to prove that I was not a machine. My training had prepared me for this moment so well that I am now certain that I was practically a machine--my fingers worked without the aid of my brain, which was busy chewing on the time limit printed at the top of each page and panicking. What if I could not discern and enter the random words within two minutes and fifteen seconds? I could not let this effort fizzle into failure.

The Internet Explorer tab provided that I would have a one minute wait while Ticketmaster searched for the best available tickets. I hoped only for available--best was of no concern to me. While Ticketmaster sifted through its records, I scooted over to Firefox to go through the same stages, just in case something went wrong in Internet Explorer. Here I wound up with a two minute wait, which led me to believe that my progress in Internet Explorer, which worry had distorted as an ordeal, had taken mere seconds. After all, certainly an early October game against a division rival, when the weather would likely be ideal both for football and for spectating, would be a popular ticket!

Less than a minute had passed when I clicked back over to Internet Explorer. There they were. I raised my glasses and rubbed my eyes. Squinted to make sure. There were tickets reserved just for me! I now had to muzzle my excitement in order to ensure that the shipping and payment methods were correct. I checked the numbers formed from colored LCD pixels against those embossed in my plastic card. They matched. I might have yelped. I clicked SUBMIT. I checked my email. The confirmation was there. I might have yelped again. At 10:03:54 I sent Summer an email which contained thirty-six exclamation points. I got up and paced and sat back down.

I breathed again. The sun shone brightly through the windows into the study. My efforts and training had paid off. I had tickets, and I was finally going to see my beloved Eagles on their home turf.