I shouldn’t be writing this right now, I should be working, especially considering I was 10 minutes late this morning. I got up like I always do — the box of cocoa puffs was a little low I suppose, but that wasn’t traumatic enough to put my morning routine in shambles. No, what really threw off my morning routine was the 20 minutes I spent in front of my computer clicking the same link and getting the same message: “Server is too busy.” 

For the first time ever, Sen. Ted Stevens’s infamous rant about the internet being a series of tubes that can become clogged if not protected by appropriate federal legislation kinda sorta rang true — at least when taken in reference to the internet they use at the UW athletics department. 

I know you don’t want to hear a grown man (well, sorta) whine about how tough it was to get his football tickets and I know there are more pressing matters going on in the world right now. That Iran thing seems like kinda a big deal and I’m sure our government is up to something as well, but our athletic department should know better than this. 

I mean seriously, they have had six months to prepare for what they knew would be a flood of site traffic, and after last year’s ticket e-mail debacle and the ill-conceived seating policy changes, they should have put a lot more effort into doing something right. No one walked away from the Cal Poly game saying, “What a thrilling victory, I will cut the athletic department a break on all football administration-related matters for the next nine months.” 

What else could the athletic department have been doing since January? Have they had the IT guy working round the clock to sabotage Michael Bleach’s columns before he can call for another coach to be fired? Scheming to trick Bret Bielema into having the hawkeye tattoo removed? 

The worst part about this was that I was actually excited for the change in ticket distribution format. “First come, first served” seemed like a good gauge of whether you bled red or cardinal, but the whole idea of first come being “first served” was thrown out the window by that “server is too busy error message” that dominated my computer screen for half an hour this morning. To their credit, the department managed to get some sort of system up that (presumably) put people into a queue and let that be the end of it. 

But still, for the first half hour of this internet free for all, it wasn’t first come first. It came down to who got that lucky click in at the right time — so besides having to be awake at 8:30 AM, the main determinant for a while was…chance. Sounds a lot like a lottery to me. 

If the IT guy doesn’t have time to make sure the damn website works, then hire an intern. If the intern turns out to be a political science major instead of a computer science major, hire a monkey. It the monkey can’t take the Wisconsin winter and runs away, then just outsource it to Ticketmaster (or India) because this is ridiculous. 

As my vigil nears the two hour mark, I take that back, it’s not ridiculous, it’s downright embarrassing. What is supposed to be a big time football program is using some software thingy that says it was copyrighted in 2006, two years after Barry Alvarez became athletic director. Some progress we’ve made since then, huh?  Don’t get me wrong, I’ll do the bow at football games — Alvarez is still the emperor of the Badger sports universe. But over the last year, the athletic department has been steadily disrobed by a series of administrative mishaps and after today, I can’t quite shake the feeling that if he’s not naked, he doesn’t have many clothes left. 

Joe Labuz (labuz@wisc.edu) is a senior with football tickets but is still pissed off.

1 Comment | Leave a comment

M F | July 8, 2009 6:14 PM | Reply

I have no idea where you guys "herald" from, but after reading this article I have to say I'm rolling on the ground. Being a 29 year old Comp. Sci. graduate and working in the tech. field, I'd have to agree with you Joe - this is quite an embarrassment, for any size organization. If the football tickets attracted a small crowd that crashed the servers, then I'd say it's time to upgrade the servers. If it's a large crowd, then there's most-likely enough of a budget to handle this type of traffic and this problem should've been prevented a long time ago.
Now, I'm sure there is a very good reason for this to have happened (for SOMEBODY'S job's sake, anyway), and I'll bet the problem was detected as soon as it happened and a fix came as soon as possible. However, loaning somebody a bicycle because the car they bought from you doesn't exactly work isn't my idea of a good solution.
I agree Joe - IT needs to get with the program.

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