There. Is. No. Queue. There Never Was.

Exactly what kind of game is Ticketek playing here?

Taylor Swift has a gorgeous song on the Hunger Games soundtrack called ‘Safe & Sound’. It is desperate and haunting, much like the experience of trying to purchase Eras Tour tickets in Australia.

But there was one thing we could always hold on to – the queue. The queue meant law. It meant order. It meant that if we tried, we might succeed.

Well, thanks to Ticketek’s admission that there is in fact no queue and tickets are issued at random, we have been left neither safe nor sound. We are Back To December here. No longer on Holy Ground. We crashed those pre-sale sites for nothing. All those deeply emotional messages to American Express might as well have been letters to Santa Claus for all the good it did us.

Make no mistake, this is anarchy in its purest form. A free for all where winners are chosen at random, plucked from a mass of digital code. No one knows why they’ve been blessed with tickets or cursed to ticketlessly watch the winners celebrate. Why did we crash all those pre-sale sites? 

Are we all just greedy chocolate chumps tearing apart bar after bar in search of Willy Wonka’s Golden Ticket? Are we in a Hunger Games of our own, where it seems like some people come out on top but really all of society loses? Or is it more of a Twilight situation, where we’ve fallen in love with moody vampires?

That last one probably isn’t that relevant, but the fact remains that this is a mess and I have had enough. I will not participate. I will not play this particular game, no matter how hungry I get. I opt out. I protest. I would like to be excluded from this narrative. (One that I never asked to be a part of since two days ago.) Because there’s no winning here. I may turn out to be one of the lucky few who wins a ticket. Yes, it’s still possible. But this is now the second article I’ve written about not getting Taylor Swift tickets and it’s starting to feel ridiculous. How much emotional capital do I have to spend? 

Wait, I’m told that Taylor Swift added additional shows. Additional. Shows.

You’ll be alright. No one can hurt you now.

Main image credit: Getty