Elation to Frustration...Trying for White House Easter Egg Roll Tickets
How did you spend your Thursday? If you were like me and so many other DC Metro parents you
probably spent a portion of it online trying to secure White House Easter Egg
Roll tickets for your family only to experience hope, disappointment, and
frustration repeatedly throughout the day.
This year the White House abandoned the old practice of waiting in line on the Ellipse the weekend before the event. When I first heard that tickets were going to be distributed online, I thought this was a brilliant idea. No longer would families be camping out, trading parenting shifts to secure highly coveted tickets. Going online to reserve tickets seemed like a much more humane method of ticketing.
Or so I thought. Since the ticketing information was quite vague, there was a lot of speculation about the process for obtaining tickets. The official website did not say what time today the online ticketing portal would open and there were also rumors of a lottery system. Speculation abounded on my various DC mom listservs, Twitter, and through my friends on Facebook.
When ticketing finally became available, it was clear that
the Obama Administration and/or the online ticketing system powered by Front
Gate Tickets did not to understand the lengths that parents will go to for
White House Easter Egg Roll tickets whether waiting outside in the cold or
camping out online.
Messages on my listservs, Tweets from strangers who answered my queries about tickets, and friends on Facebook reported checking all day long. The game seemed to be about waiting, clicking, and refreshing the screen. Over and over again. Every once and awhile I was lucky enough to wait, click, enter, wait, hope, wait, wait, and wait only to be kicked out by a server error. Or the ticketing server crashing. Or my browser timing me out from having to wait too long for the screen to update. Numerous times I was lucky enough to click on the link allowed me to enter the Front Gate Ticketing portal, select the number of tickets for my desired time, and get to the verification page only to have the Front Gate server time out due to overwhelming demand. Then it became another round of waiting, clicking, and refreshing in hopes that the ticket portal would open up for me again.
Apparently there are people out there who were lucky enough to get the coveted golden e-mail confirmations to the 2009 White House Easter Egg Roll. Sadly, I am not one of them.
Perhaps the Obama Administration will reconsider the ticketing system for the 2010 Easter Egg Roll and revert back to distributing tickets on the Ellipse. If so, I’ll take my chances waiting for my tickets with the masses potentially cold weather rather than chance it on inadequate technology.
Leticia writes about the good kind of technology at Tech Savvy Mama, a site for parents seeking the best technology products, websites, and software for themselves and their children.
