No Paper Trail

Well, we were planning on going to one of the last NIN shows at the end of the month, but I just never seem to have any luck with these smaller venue shows. A first pre-sale attempt failed because I wasn't on the ticket buying page two hours before the start time. The New York sales going on an hour before crashed the web site, and the site remained nearly impossible to access through the sales time for the Chicago show. Ok, that was fine, because a public sale was still going to happen July 31, when most of the tickets would be sold. And scalpers would be kept to a minimum, since a paperless ticket system meant that the ticket buyer had to provide his credit card at the show with no opportunity of passing off tickets. Sounds good, right? Well, the problem was that there was another pre-sale on July 24th. Only one day notice was given. Normally I check the website everyday, but I didn't check it the day before. I did check at about 8 p.m. on the 24th. The tickets had gone on sale at 5 p.m. All gone, of course, and reportedly most people who tried to buy tickets were successful, and some even got tickets for two nights. Later I found out that no tickets were held for the public sale, so that was it. I was wondering why I didn't at least received an email about it, and it turns out that the email went to a secondary email address, even though my main email address is listed on the site. I just checked ebay, and while there are a few tickets being sold (again, the seller has to walk in with the person who wins the tickets), it is not that many when you consider that several shows in three different cities are listed. So maybe the professional scalpers were stopped. And Trent won't be touring again anytime soon, if ever, so it doesn't help me any.