The dining halls were unusually tense last Monday night. Typically, at this point of the term, student accommodations are relatively quiet as most filter home for a self-imposed week of ‘Mental Wellbeing’, just before deadline season starts to kick in. But last Monday saw a break in this period of midterm peace and quiet, as tickets for the much-anticipated Enchanted Garden Ball (EGB) were to be released imminently, and the pressure began to build. Now, even us freshers knew the stakes were high, everyone knew that EGB wasn’t just your average Monday night at Fever, and the demand to get tickets was higher than a Bristol student on a Wednesday night. Failure to secure a ticket meant one of two things, either you could buy one off Overheard from a hacker, but seeing as they often went for double or even triple the retail price, you’d have to sell your right Kidney to afford it (not ideal). Or, you could simply not go, but run the risk of missing out on one of the best times of your life, losing all your friends as a consequence and spending the rest of your days roaming this world alone and never having been to EGB. Failure, therefore, was not an option.
10 minutes until release…
Quickly I gathered some friends to secure a game plan for the 6pm deadline. Our time was short and our collective brain power even shorter, but here’s what we came up with:
Option 1: Find a spot with good Wi-Fi (not as easy as you might think in Exeter), set our alarms for 5:59 and secure a ticket through FIXR. Simple, elegant, what could go wrong?
Option 2: Find a reasonably cheap society who were selling tickets to their members, join it and get our tickets through them. Not a perfect plan but a backup none the less.
Option 3: Channel my inner Steve McQueen and start digging a tunnel from Penny C to the site of EGB, so that by the time the event came in June, we could sneak past security without a ticket. I might add, we had started to panic at this point so possibly not the best option.
30 seconds until release…
There we sat in Lopes Dining Room, constantly refreshing our FIXR until a blank screen hit our phones. The tickets sold out in 2 seconds? How was that possible?
Quickly we initiated Option 2 and started so search for societies on Instagram who were still selling tickets to their members. So, as of 6:01 Monday night, I became the first male member of the ‘Taylor Swift Society’ (again I was panicking and somewhat desperate). Swifty status confirmed, I went to the link on their Instagram to get myself my ticket. Surely I’d be EGB-bound?
To my great dismay, I was greeted with the same blank screen that awaited me after I’d tried Option 1. Damn, I became Swifty for nothing! Time to email for a refund.
It was only after 10 minutes of fluster and widespread panic that our nerves were put at ease by a message from the organisers stating that FIXR ‘couldn’t handle the excitement’ and the release was postponed.
During those 10 minutes, there were 8 fights amongst flat mates (3 of them physical), 4 windows smashed and 3 kitchens set on fire from the panic.
So now we’ve got to go through the same song and dance again, with all the highs and lows that might entail. But, with the same number of tickets ready to be sold, and the demand growing each week, I’m not liking my chances for the next release. I think I’m going to initiate Option 3…time to get digging.
