Unlike the Olympics’ second round of ticketing -- during which the online sales system was overwhelmed with traffic and ultimately forced to a halt -- Round 3 sales were heralded as a success by China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency. Within the first thirty minutes of the 9am opening on Monday, May 5th, the baseball, boxing soccer and wrestling events were sold out. Within the first three hours, 60,000 tickets had been sold online and an additional four events had been bought out. The batch of 1.38 million tickets made available to China-based buyers was purchased in its entirety within two days.

    Still, it was anything but smooth surfing when I tried to buy tickets — and it seems I’m not the only one who experienced Internet hiccups, if you see reports in the Wall Street Journal and the Wall Street Journal China blog, as well as ESPN and Al Jazeera and the Shanghai Daily. Other than the pair of tickets I managed to purchase precisely at 9:01am, a friend and I spent the rest of the day logged into our Olympic ticketing accounts attempting to buy additional tickets -- to no avail.

    We were given a constant run-around. For example, if we clicked into the ticketing page for events that BOCOG had announced still had tickets “Available”, oftentimes the web programming appeared incomplete. We didn't get an announcement that the tickets were now Unavailable” (which was used to indicate that tickets had been sold out). Nor did we get the alternative option to “Add to lot” or “Continue”, which is how I had managed my first set of tickets.

     Once we did find a ticketing page that still had tickets “Available” -- and which had either a functional “Add to lot” or “Continue” button -- we tried to click through. We were met by the less than reassuring “We are currently working on your request” response.

     The order-processing, blue ticker tape snailed its way across my screen for over nine hours. 

     In addition to these types of delays routing our requests, every one of two attempts met a blank screen or the message “Firefox can’t find the server”. Sometimes it wasn’t Firefox specifically that got blamed: it was any browser I used, at least according to the common message “Bad request: your browser sent a request your server could not understand”.

     When my browser and server were actually cooperating, and when that blue ticker tape paraded me through the order processing system successfully, I became accustomed to the inconclusive “We’re sorry, we’re unable to process your order right now”. I would return to the same event to check on its status; and there were invariably still tickets “Available”. Since this meant my chosen event had not been sold out, I wonder if “unable” simply meant “unwilling.”

    According to Zhu Yan, director of the Beijing ticketing center, the online system received 27 million hits per hour during its peak, and he openly admitted “the website may become a bit slow during peak hours but it's still normal and there's no problem.” Since I’m lucky enough to have tickets for the Women’s Soccer Finals, I guess I should be thankful the system was only “slow” and not dysfunctional like Round 2.

   And we still have Round 4 to go.