Imagine a supermarket where you could browse the myriad products available through that Internet and select which ones you so desired. Upon choosing your stuff, you submit your request and sit back, possibly to suck on a sweet, sweet cigar.
The supermarket tells you not to worry about payment right away; just make sure you've got enough brass in your account and within the next 6-8 weeks, we'll take a random amount, depending on how much of the stuff you wanted is actually available in stock.
But wait! After waiting the required time for your stuff, you don't actually have it. Instead, all you have is an email saying 'you've got some of the stuff you asked for, squire' and a hole in your bank balance with no reference to the products you've ended up with.
Skip forward a few more weeks and you finally receive your goods. But what's this? Where you asked for toilet paper, you have soap. Where you asked for a roast chicken, you have a single stock cube. Where you asked for a £15 bottle of Merlot, you have half a bottle of Lambrini with the lid missing.
'Shambolique', as the French definitely say.
OK, so such a supermarket probably doesn't exist, but this analogy more or less reflects the way in which tickets for the 2012 Olympics have been allocated. Put simply, you request all the possible tickets you might want, make sure you've got enough money to cover them all, then sit back and wait for fuck all to turn up. If you are one of the lucky ones, you get an email saying "Well done there, you have tickets" and your bank balance is shorn of the necessary funds. But they don't tell you what you've ended up with (almost certainly because you requested the 100 metres final and ended up with diving heats) so you have to wait until they turn up to find out how much of a swizz it was.
Surely there was a better way of handling this? Why did you have to put all your eggs in one basket and have enough money to cover every eventuality? Why couldn't you have a ranking system, where you put a 1, 2 or 3 against the tickets in the order of preference, and they tried to allocated priority 1 tickets first, then 2, then 3, instead of giving you everything available and assuming you've got the money to cover it? Most people cottoned on to the fact that the chances of getting anything were slim so requested just about everything, leaving them open to the possibility of tens of thousands of pounds being withdrawn, although naturally, that never happened.
For a games which has been touted as the greenest, as well as being ahead of schedule (although nowhere near budget) I find this element of the process pitiful. The organisers seem to have come up with the easiest possible system for them (to get rid of the tickets as quickly as possible) without actually considering the people behind the requests. Alright, there are 50-odd million of us in this country, but surely there could have been a better way of distributing them than this? You might as well have just stood on top of Nelson's Column, chucked all of the tickets into the air and shouted 'Scramble!'. At least there would have been a modicum of chance involved then. Shysters.
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