I just wasted an hour of a precious Friday off from work trying to buy concert tickets. Silly me, I thought ordering online would be quick and simple, not like those horrible old days when we had to actually leave the house and travel to some other physical location, whereupon we would conduct the transaction by the light of whale-oil lamps while we tried to ignore the woolly mammoths crashing around out in the parking lot.

I seem to recall that, when I first started going to concerts way back in the early ’80s, I bought most of my tickets from a long-gone record store about ten miles from my home. I no longer remember the name of the place, sadly, but it seems like it was a classic High Fidelity-style hole in the wall, deeper than it was wide, crowded with as many record bins as the owner could squeeze into the space and still have room to walk between them. The walls were plastered with posters, and the light through the front windows was diffused through hanging tapestries screened with Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd cover art. The air was always thick with incense — probably to conceal other odors I was too naive to identify — and part of the pleasure of those early concert-going days was that the tickets remained fragrant with the scent of sandalwood for days after I bought them.

By the early ’90s, the ritual had changed. Now instead of a leisurely visit to my friendly neighborhood long-haired audiophile, I was getting up at the crack of dawn and driving to the concert venue itself to stand in line with all the other schmucks who believed that buying tickets directly from the box office might get them close enough to the stage to actually see something. The last show I remember doing this for was Jimmy Buffett’s 1992 Recession Recess tour, and even though I was hanging with my buddy Jeremy and got to see a beautiful sunrise, the whole ordeal left me exhausted and feeling like a damn fool who needed to reconsider his priorities. And this was before all that arcane nonsense involving wristbands that entitled you to come back later for the actual purchase!

Technology has now freed us from all of that. When it works, that is. As I said above, I figured ordering online — something not entirely unfamiliar to me, in case you were wondering — would take all of five minutes and I could get about my business for the day. But no… every time I clicked “Buy,” I was directed to a “waiting room” screen that helpfully informed me traffic was high and asked me to try again in a few minutes. I played this game for a while, growing increasingly antsy as I imagined the number of available seats dropping like the ammo counter on Ripley’s pulse-rifle. Finally, I broke through to the order screen, only to find that the stupid system wouldn’t allow me to select the price range I wanted to buy. There was a dropdown for price range, but it didn’t work. The system kept stubbornly showing me only the most expensive seats instead of giving me options. I tried refreshing a couple of times, then it was back to the waiting room. Then, at about the 50-minute mark, a new screen appeared, claiming that the show was now sold out, so sorry.

I boiled for a minute or so, then decided on a hunch to try an older technology, the lowly telephone. I figured that if nothing else, I could tell a customer-service drone what I thought of their damn website.

I dialed the venue’s box office. An actual human being picked up halfway through the second ring. I told her I’d been having a very frustrating time trying to order online and the system was now claiming the show was sold out. She sounded genuinely puzzled when she answered — without hesitation, I might add — that that show wasn’t sold out; she had available seats on her screen at that very moment, and would I care to order any from her?

I had my tickets within four minutes. And as I was hanging up, it occurred to me that if that old record store was still around, I could’ve driven down there, bought my tickets and probably an album or two, had a nice conversation with the old hippie behind the counter, stopped for a cappucino, and been home in about the same amount of time I’d been futzing around with our “convenient” modern technology.

Feh.