The 5 things that I learnt from the queue at SISTIC

5) It is more likely a human fault
While I was queuing up for the Mayday Concert tickets, the computer hung on a couple of occasions, what bemused me was that they claimed that the server was overloaded and thats why its so slow. But I do not agree -- that may convince some of the non-programmers, but based on what I've seen on the screen, the counter staffs, obviously new to the job, is not used to handling buyers with more than 10 tickets. They seem to blunder when making bulk payments.

4) A system design for such a big company, should at least, have some efficiency.
SISTIC is the biggest ticket selling organization in Singapore, but not the best. If what claimed by the personnel from the counter was right, they are all running on a single server through the Internet, which was never safe. And judging by the fact that the Mayday's concert can only be bought from IMM that day, there shouldn't be a sudden increase in traffic on the website. So, unless SISTIC's website had been like that every single day, I'm not convinced that a single counter at IMM SISTIC will cause the whole system to crash.

3) I can really endure long hours of standing without food and drinks
No toilet, no food for the whole day, no water for the whole day, I found myself, together with the others, simply magnificent!

2) The fans are all very cute
Including me, everyone in the queue used a Mayday title as their ring tone! That is very odd to find out, but as time goes on, we begin to hear more and more people's mobile phone ringing, and we all smiled when heard something familiar. PY's call to me is 最重要的小事 while the other calls to me are 天使 :D

1) Technology, when failed, should not bring inconvenience to life.
From a basic point of view, technology should bring convenience to life, I agree with that, in fact, that is what we programmers do all the time. I have been striving to learn new technologies and apply them to my systems... sometimes for fun, but I will be enormously proud of my work should it saved somebody's effort of spending more time on meaningless job.

Now, from a reverse point of view. Technology, in turn, should not cause much dependencies on human. That is, when a technology fails to deliver, human should still be able to get the job done manually, that is the ultimate design of a good working system.

How often do we see that people complaining jobs could not be done in the event of a software application failure? At my company, technology's everything. It seems to be the case at SISTIC as well.

Why isn't there an interim solution to move on and manually book the tickets, instead wanting the crowd to just stand there for numerous boring hours, and some even got to stand under the sun?

Moreover, this ticket selling session is only opened at a single location, which makes it even easier to manage, isn't it?

Now I'm going to change my direction a bit... I hope that in the future, whatever system I've did... and when its down, will not cause such significant inconveniences to the public. :D