Ask anyone around me and they'll know that I'm probably the last person in the world to diss the Olympics. I can deal the with £9 billion budget (actually £11 billion if my sources are correct), coz it's a lot cheaper than what Beijing paid. I can deal with the overt corporate sponsorship, coz McDonald's is funding all the training we GMs get and Adidas is sponsoring my uniform and trainers which I'll get to keep. I can even deal with the gridlock of tourists swarming London transport, coz, well, I'm used to swearing underneath my breath everytime I hit a wall of slowpokes in London. At the height of the Olympics moaning by both friends and the media, I took solace by ignoring the negative press and by blocking my whiny friends.
However, if there's one thing that I must make an exception for, it's the Olympics ticket sales.
When the first ballot for Olympic tickets came up, I put in bids for the cheapest tickets for the Opening Ceremony, and the badminton finals. With the strange ballot process, I had to leave a few hundred pounds in my account just so that it may get withdrawn from at some point in the future by an unknown organization. If fraudsters were looking for a window of opportunity, they definitely had that for a good few months last year.
I had no hope in hell of getting the Opening Ceremony tickets, coz the whole world was gunning for those, so it was a pleasant surprise when I found out that I've been allocated two tickets for the badminton finals. Malaysia's best prospect for gold is in badminton, so I was quite chuffed about snagging tickets.
A year on, my smugness about getting tickets have been turned into desperation because I now want more tickets! MOAR! Especially since I've just realized that when I volunteer for the Paralympics, my accreditation doesn't give me access to the Olympic Park, so I'll have to buy tickets to get in!
So I've been scouting the wonderland that is the official tickets website, looking for more Olympic tickets. My friend's written a brilliant post about the joys of using it, and so has this blog post, and I concur wholeheartedly. Ever since LOCOG announced that they're reselling tickets throughout the duration of the Games, the ticket-buying process has just been even worse. You jump with joy when the website says you can indeed buy the cheap tickets online, then you select the ones you want, click 'Request the tickets', wait upwards of 20 mins before your hopes are cruelly dashed with the ominous 'No tickets left' :(
It hurts, LOCOG, it really does. How can you give me so much hope, just to keep me waiting for so long, only to be rejected in the end? And I keep getting rejected over and over again. Talk about pushing my psychological buttons!
But anyway, to alleviate the situation, I have now panic bought some Paralympic tickets that will get me into the Olympic Park and an ExCeL day pass, so all's well I suppose :)
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