Clare May Ball Committee forced into “full ticket recall” after college revolts at ticket blunders

Committee member complained she felt the “whole college is against us” after a series of embarrassing ticketing hiccoughs brought the Clare May Ball ticketing system to a halt.

Tickets were meant to go on sale at 8.00 am, but the committee, who clearly have far too much faith in humanity, put it “under testing conditions” from 3.00 am, which were “unfortunately taken advantage of”.

Around 8.00 am, a number of buyers were unable to access the site, and at 8.30 am it crashed. Of those who did get it to work, some told of ominous error pages coupled with a disturbing delay in receiving confirmation emails.

Literally who even knows what happened

The Committee told students that the website would probably only be up again by midday and begged them not “to refresh the site repeatedly”.

More like the disoriented express amirite

Tickets went back on sale at 6.00 pm to Clare students, but confusion abounded as to who had actually gotten tickets in the morning and who would have to try again at 6.00 pm.

Worse still, some people trying to get on the waiting list were met by the following “fatal error”:

Well that makes sense.

When tickets finally sold out, students complained that “so many Clare students now can’t attend their own May Ball”.

While the Committee said “the same amount of tickets were set aside for Clare students as in all previous years”, others disagreed:

He says, she says.

One person wrote on Facebook: “I consider this an issue around which the people responsible for this ticketing system should consider resigning their position and sacrificing any benefits-in-kind due to members of the CMB committee.”

Others took a more circumspect view:

“I think a lot of people are just feeling really let down by this entire ticketing system. As a member of Clare I don’t expect to be competing with everyone else in the university for tickets to my own college’s ball, I can think of no other college that does this. Also the fact tickets were released before the specified time is just not ok on any level. The biggest issue however with this system, along with it being open to the entire university, is that these non Clare students could also get 5 tickets each. This obviously gives a knock on effect, eating into our guest tickets, which should have been prioritized. With everyone’s guest tickets being allocated to random strangers, people have resorted to putting down their boyfriends/girlfriends/family/friends as Clare tickets in the second release. This is surely the reason for unprecedented demand and has meant some people in their final year at Clare have to resort to the waiting list, something which should never have happened.”

After all this trouble, the Committee finally “made the decision to recall all tickets distributed so far”. One student took short shrift with the ticket recall and commented on Facebook: “You have literally caused so much inconvenience.”

Another, more sympathetic student commented: “Well done CMB, brave decision to take and a good one! Now please, go and get some sleep!”

Prescient.

The committee apologised for the inconvenience caused and pleaded with students, hoping that “many of you still wish to attend Clare May Ball this year”.

The President will be releasing a full statement at 6.00 pm.