Almost twenty-two hours after tickets went on sale for the Wisconsin Film Fest, My Darling B is still trying to get tickets to a couple of the shows we wanted to see. One of them is sold out, but she’s so darn sure she ought to have tickets to it that she’s written to one of the higher-ups to ask. I admire her tenacity, but I have my doubts that she will be given any kind of preferential treatment, considering that almost everyone who tried to buy tickets on-line got the shaft by the film fest’s new ticket vendor.

It was the most awful ticket-buying experience ever. Last year, we bought tickets on line to eleven films, and it took about twenty minutes. We were ready and waiting at the computer at noon, began punching in our requests as soon as the web site made tickets available, and after hitting the “Submit” button and holding our breaths, had a confirmation a few minutes later that all our tickets were purchased. Easy-peasy.

This year, same story – except all after “hitting the ‘Submit’ button.” A pop-up appeared on the screen with the message, “Processing your request…” and one of those blue progress bars that gets longer and longer until it reaches the end, then abruptly resets itself at the beginning and starts growing longer again. It teased us like that for ten minutes, then winked out of existence, and we were back at the first web page we started at. No confirmation, no indication at all that we had tickets. Worse, none of our selections were saved, even though we had to create an account to pay for the tickets. We had to start over and resubmit the whole order, which we did … and got booted out again after hitting “Submit”!

I was sitting at my computer, trying to get some information off the film fest Twitter feed, when B’s head exploded the second time around. As she began to reload her order form, I said I would try to order tickets for the two films we wanted to watch on the first day of the festival. When I submitted my order, it went through on the first try, so she tried ordering just the films for Friday while I worked on Thursday’s films. I got my order in right away again while her screen kept teasing her with the “Processing your order” pop-up, so I also bought tickets for Sunday, or maybe it was Saturday, I forget. Anyway, those went through, too, but then my luck ran out and I wasn’t able to get another order through. Meanwhile, B’s order timed out again, and her head exploded, again.

After two hours of that, I threw my hands up and said I was done. I’ve loved going to the film fest these past three years, so much that I even took a week off from work so we could devote all day to watching films, but this was more frustration that all that enjoyment was worth. If we only got to see ten or eleven films and had huge holes in the middle of some of our days, so be it. My Darling B was not so easily frustrated, however. She kept plugging away, on and off, until almost five o’clock that afternoon, when Tim came over for dinner, and tried a couple more times later that night. For her efforts, she even managed to get two tickets to a movie that we had all but written off.

And this morning, she wrote a firm but polite e-mail to the film fest staff, pointing out that we paid the transaction fee of $4.00 five or six times instead of just once, as a result of breaking our one big order into several little orders, and we didn’t get the discount on ticket prices that we could have gotten if we’d bought all thirty-some tickets in one gulp. The price starts at $8.00 a ticket, but the price per ticket goes down the more you buy. We should have paid $6.50 per ticket for our total order.

It was a sad start to what is usually such a fun way to spend a week. With any luck, it’ll be a dimming memory by the time we go to see the first movie on April 18th.