One of my tasks for the day, and believe me I’ve been so busy recently with work that I had plenty of tasks to perform today at home, was to look into buying some theatre tickets for the Lion King musical at the Orpheum here in San Francisco early next year.

As with many of these things, the tickets are being sold online through TicketMaster. Sounds good? Well, the people that designed the TicketMaster booking system should be fired! The system, for those that have not tried using it, requires the user to guess which particular show will have seats left and then enter one of those words-in-a-graphic validation things. If you were unlucky in your guess, you get to go back to the beginning and guess again.

How much intelligence does it take to realise that what any user will want to do is specify the number of seats, the acceptable classes of seating and have the system present a list of dates that have matching seats available?

Finally, just to rub salt into the wound, if you do finally manage to find a date where seats that match your needs are available, they charge you what they call a convenience fee. How does this system rate as convenient? What definition of the word are they using?