Tickets for Bruce Springsteen’s gigs at the RDS Dublin for May 5 and 7 went on sale this morning at 8am, and it’s no surprise there was huge demand.
I’m a massive Bruce fan and have seen him 6 times in concert. After two years without any live music, there was no way I was missing his 2023 show in Dublin.
I logged onto my laptop at 7.55am and got myself set up, credit card in hand, with the hopes of getting 2 standing tickets for the Sunday night gig.
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I watched the countdown and at exactly 8am I was put straight into an online queue - and my heart sank.
There were 49,000 people ahead of me in the queue.
Clearly logging on 5 minutes beforehand was a big mistake.
A quick Google search showed that the RDS takes about 18,000 people, so this was not good news.
I then tried to queue using my phone to see if that would make any difference. Here it said there were 61,000 people ahead of me. I started to stress out.
WhatsApp group messages were flying as people got more and more anxious about their chance of getting tickets.
There were rumours of an extra date being added, but nothing confirmed. So maybe there is hope.
Next thing a message came in on the group that the Friday night was sold out. Panic started to set in.
At this point it was 8.40am and there were still 12,000 people ahead of me.
I was honestly quite surprised by the demand. Ticket prices were exceptionally high compared to previous years, with a standing ticket coming in at €131. Surely only the biggest fans would be willing to pay this? Irish people must love Bruce Springsteen!
We’re now at 8,000 and it’s starting to move fast. There is probably a few more minutes of waiting to go but I have the credit card ready just in case.
I was hoping for standing tickets but at this point I will take whatever I can get.
Finally we’re through and we have 2 tickets for Sunday night standing. Rejoice!
I fire in my credit card details and open the BOI app for authentication.
My heart stops. There is an error.
The app isn’t working.
As panic sets in I get the nightmare message on my screen I never saw coming- ‘You have timed out’.
And it looks like Friday and Sunday are now sold out.
Rage sets in and all I can say is there was a lot of swearing and shouting going on. My poor husband had to endure a major outburst that I'm sure has him seriously rethinking the relationship.
But wait…there is hope.
Bruce has officially announced a 3rd date and tickets for Tuesday May 9 are available now.
Thankfully I don’t have to go back to the bottom of the queue, Ticketmaster has brought me straight to the standing tickets for Tuesday night.
This time I use my AIB card. I carefully put in my details, approve on my AIB app…and we’re sorted! Two standing tickets to see Bruce Springsteen on the Tuesday night.
My stress levels were through the roof with all the credit card nonsense but thankfully everything ended well.
Once I had my tickets secured, I found out there was actually an outage with Bank of Ireland.
A total of 60% of users are reporting issues with mobile banking while nearly 30% are having problems logging into the online website, according to DownDetector.com.
Replying to complaints on Twitter, a spokesperson for the Bank of Ireland said: "We have had reports of customers having issues with their apps. Please be assured we have raised this with our support team to look into this further."
Well, despite Bank of Ireland’s best efforts, I have my tickets sorted.
See you next year Bruce! Now I must go apologise to my lovely husband...
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