Burning Man Ticket Launch 2008

We arrived at the Burning Man headquarters at 9:00am. That's really early for us geeks, honestly, and particularly painful for a handful of the more nocturnal types in our crew.

But if there's one true thing about Burners, they're pretty smart. Our bosses know that if you're going to try and get a geek in the office anytime before the crack of noon, you'll be much more successful by plying them with bacon, waffles, hash browns, and coffee. But most importantly ... bacon.

It was the third Wednesday in January ... also known as Burning Man ticket launch day. In years past, we've had some nightmarish scenarios on launch day, where participants, eager to acquire the cheapest tickets they could get, would attack our website all at once, absolutely crushing our ticketing partner's servers. Between the confusion and frustration, mayhem would ensue ... and the electronic bulletin boards would erupt with screaming posts from angry participants.

Two years ago in 2006, I was manning the Burning Man website from the comfort of my home office. As soon as tickets went on sale at 10am, all hell broke loose. The deluge was so great that it actually overloaded the power circuits at the colo facility, taking all the ticketing servers down. Still bleary eyed with sleep, I ended up locked at my computer dealing with the fallout for 12 hours straight ... never got out of my pajamas, never got up to eat, get coffee, or even use the bathroom. It was an absolute horror. And as much as participants suffered through that day, the ticketing team suffered worse.

Since that day, we've worked hard with InTicketing (our ticketing partner), and made great strides towards improving the stability and flexibility of the servers to handle the massive load. And most importantly, we did some social engineering ... we created a queue that tells people where they are in line, so they can put their minds at rest, and know where they stand, rather than opening up browser window after window and hitting refresh until their fingers bleed.

In honor of the debacle that was the 2006 ticket launch, the whole Burning Man office staff now wears pajamas on ticket day, and we feast on a great (if nutritionally bankrupt) breakfast before we open the floodgates. It makes for a wonderful scene around the office, people padding around in their jammies, hoovering waffles.

The team here at BMHQ keep in constant touch with InTicketing and our system administrators during the day through an uber-geeky chat application called Internet Relay Chat (or IRC, in the parlance). The "topic" of the chat room this day was "Missing Apes Found Shaved." Theoretically, this should in no way affect the ticket purchasing experience itself, but one never knows.

We also keep in touch with our participants through Tribe, the ePlaya, and email, providing periodic updates and answers to technical questions that people were posting. This effort is meant to unwind potentially catastrophic spirals of imagination ... given a dearth of information, people always manage to conjure the worst case scenarios possible, and completely freak out. Just a little status goes a long way to keeping everybody happy.

We're pleased to report that things cranked along quite nicely for ticket launch 2008. By 11am, we'd processed 3,000 tickets. By 11:30am, we'd processed 6,000. The 10,000 tickets offered at the lowest price level ($210) were sold out by 1:00pm, and the 10,000 second level ($225) tickets by 10:40pm. Even though the pace of sales was a little slower than last year, our ticket partner still kept a steady hand on the tiller, actively managing server load and bandwidth, opening the doors a little wider as the onslaught eased.

And as ticket day 2008 came to a close, we turned off the ticketing queue which staved the masses, Burners around the globe rejoiced in their promise of playa dust, and the pajama-clad Burning Man ticketing team went home for a well-earned night's rest. Kudos to all involved.

Burn on, everybody ... we'll see you on the playa.