After it was clear that TINA had announced a new tour in the Oprah show which was to be aired shortly before the official presale we decided to go to the USA and especially to attend the first two weeks of the tour in order to be the first to know which songs she had selected and what the whole stage design and set was like. In the morning of the presale start I was very very excited because this was the first time after such a long time when we could simply use our credit card in a completely normal web-shop without any special work in order to get tickets for charity events, TV-shows or special festivals like in 2005 during the All The Best-promotion tour in Europe. The excitement was so big that I could hardly work throughout the day because I feared that we could lose the chance to get tickets. For American concert goers it is surely a very normal situation to book reserved seats but in Europe you will usually find tickets for general admission for the main floor and only reserved seats in the tiers. In the world of general admission it is only important to have tickets at all. You don't need to buy them in the very first minutes of the presale in order to be in the first rows but you can buy your tickets at any time and have to wait throughout the day to be in front row. During the last years, we got old so that waiting for the whole day so as to be in front of the stage was not an attractive situation but we were quite sure that there would be no reserved seats in Europe as always. But we were not sure if there would be a European tour at all. Like for the What's Love-tour it could happen that the main part of the whole event took place in the USA. Therefore, I really pushed my friends to cross the ocean; I really feared that when we would learn that there was no EU-tour that all the perfect tickets for the US dates were already sold.

Therefore, I expected much of this day. We had prepared for the pre sale for the first four or five concerts with distributing the different shows to either Sid or me. Lars could not go online for such a very private reason at work so we had to do it on our own. At around 10:00 I phoned Sid in order to rehearse the whole thing with him using a software for video conferences of my company. This was very useful as we've found that you had to enter the letters shown in a very artistic image which I had forgotten since my last visit of the website ... yesterday. We tested the whole procedure on several other artists whose concerts we will surely never attend because we did not even know their names.

At around 11:00 Sid had forwarded me an email from the mailing list in which someone stated that there was a special password for this Oprah-presale. This aroused some astonishment because for me, this was the normal and standard presale without any Oprah and passwords. More over, there were so many emails in my inbox that I had overseen this one particular email with the most important piece of information of the whole day. To make that clear, without the oprahtina-password written vice-versa (which only added another strange detail to the whole nameless tour) we would not have been able to buy any ticket at all. This came to our minds after the whole presale which lasted only for 10 minutes because we were so quick buying and booking everything we saw when we finally tested to buy tickets without entering the password. There was a simple JavaScript-message box which indicated the necessity of the password. Maybe it was possible to read the password in the HTML-/JavaScript-source code but I did not check this possibility afterwards because we were so lucky to have bought everything on time.

Around noon I was calculating again the different timezones and lost my original hope that we could benefit anyhow from the fact that the presale start was indicated at various times. Everything had to be done in Europe at precisely 17:00 in the afternoon which was not too bad because this is my normal time of leaving work. But a clear distribution of responsibilities and tasks was definitely compulsory.

At 16:50 I phoned Sid in Belgium and we waited for the remaining minutes. We refreshed the browser every two seconds, made some jokes when suddenly the first show was ready to be booked and then suddenly all shows were on sale. "I make Kansas." - "Chicago. Ready." - "Los Angeles, you Rosemont." It was quite a strict communication between Germany and Belgium for these 10 minutes which was only interrupted by things like "Can't read the strange word. Is it an English word at all?" or "Do you have this concert already?"

Lars got only an email after this episode of this day in which we stated all the successes and shopping madness of the day.

Presale Antwerp

After the very entertaining weekend with Sid in Essen at my place with visiting all the industrial highlights of the Ruhr Area which is widely known in Germany for its coal mining history we decided to choose a quite normal weekend in May 2008 for a visit in Belgium. This was even easier because there was a bank holiday in Germany on the very important Thursday which offered us the presale for the Antwerp concerts. I've already told you that on a tour like this, you are always surprised to see what kind of cities come into focus and what places on our blue planet get a shape and become clear and visible out of the shadows and the mist which are usually hiding them from your sight. Antwerp was one of these places. The only thing I knew about Antwerp and the Antwerp Sportpalais was that Tina started her 1990 Foreign Affair Tour there and that she wore the black leather dress instead of the silver one during the first half of the concert, not mentioning that the opener was still "The best" and not "Steamy windows".

The presale was about to start on 9:00 and we wanted to depart between 10:00 or 11:00 in order to arrive shortly after 14:00 in Sid's small city near Gent. Of course, I was already online at 8:30 and checked the website of the Sportpalais which had a section for the presale which had not begun yet. But everything seemed quite and normal so I could go on with my breakfast. We had agreed that I would be responsible for the second show but Annemie and Sid decided that it would be better if they would be dealing with the website because they speak Dutch as their mother tongue. And I have to admit that I could not distinguish between a black market website and an official one what surely caused some raised eyebrows with Sid so that the distribution of tasks and responsibilities was easily changed. Besides, the only word I could remember very well after the whole day and the presale for Arnhem several days later was "winkelwagen" which means "basket" in Dutch and is - literally translated - an absolute strange word in German: corner cart, and who would not be interested in shopping with an original Belgian corner cart. Besides again, the countries are very small in Europe esp. in the west so they are speaking the same language and use - surely only for making it more interesting for themselves and the rest of Europe - so different a dialect in each country that they are not completely able to understand each other if they are not using some kind of standard version of Dutch. I cannot understand it completely and I am far from being able to explain it properly but if it comes to presales, well, the only thing which is important is the winkelwagen.

At 9:00 the presale started, I wished Sid luck via e-mail and he wrote back that the website did not work properly. I checked it immediately, got a message from Marcin who tried his best from his home in England that the presale in Belgium was hell. And indeed, during the test shopping act everything worked fine with my winkelwagen but now I could not even see the website because it did not work anymore. I got nervous and began to love ticketmaster for its easiness and the Oprah-presale in particular for the good tickets and the simple transactions within 10 minutes. In the end of this so-called presale, they had to remove the whole website from the server so that the site itself displayed only a very simple HTML-message with the kind information about technical problems.

When we arrived in Belgium, we wanted to know immediately the present status of the presale and were astonished to hear the following story. It is important to remember again the famous word winkelwagen which proved its power during the events that morning. Sid and Annemie were, of course, the first online. And even they weren't exactly the first, they were in any case among the very very first to order tickets. What did they face as a problem? They entered the number of tickets as four or five which was not quite clear to me in the end. Then - as good winkelwagen-users - they hit the BOEK-button (again an important word for booking tickets to see TINA in concert, not as fascinating as the winkelwagen-word but nevertheless important) and were astonished to see a quite normal page without any sign of confirmation or congratulation to be such an early citizen of Belgium. Obviously, the website did not work properly what forced them to go back in time and change to the previous website. This was the one containing the BOEK-button which they hit again and again and again. Well, maybe you can imagine what happened to all these bookings. Yes, indeed. Within several minutes, they found a long list of emails in their inbox which kept them up to date every time they had bought the correct number of tickets - four or five, I am not quite sure as I have already said. Both were amazed, thrilled and excited but if you are struck by the TINA-fever nothing can prevent you from clicking on the link for the final confirmation. So, Annemie and Sid were the lucky consumers of 10, 20 or 100 tickets for the two Antwerp-shows. Isn't that a good fan who buys the whole amount of tickets for the main floor? Well, the Sportpalais employees were busy to correct all the mess and deleted all the orders except one per household. At least they tried because our friends still ended up with nearly half of the arena in their hands.

My first question when I heard about somebody deleting the additional tickets was "LIFO or FIFO"? To explain that in short for you: Did they delete the order "last in first out" or "first in last out"? It is very nice of the Sportpalais people to clean up the mess they caused but if you are the first to BOEK (I am quite sure that you can use this one as a verb while it is not clear if you can say "I should not have winkelwagened so much with the BOEK-button") it is of no use that you lose all the first orders and remain with a seat far in the back with a nice overview of the whole set. Six years of economic studies at university - and now finally a good occasion to show some of this scientific knowledge to my friends. Sid was able to check his account so that he could see that they did not delete all the good seats but poor Annemie was not able to see anything because she could not lock into her account anymore.

In the evening some kind of messenger software kept beeping every two minutes because Annemie, Sid and more and more fans were chatting about the whole event and collected the tickets they had bought. After the newly developed LIFO-FIFO-model I could show again my interest in "management � la winkelwagen" because we were confronted with a very interesting detail in Belgian law (or was it Dutch?): if you buy more tickets than you need (assume you buy 30 but you only need 3) then you can choose in all your confirmation emails which seats are the most suitable for you and pay only those. That means for all the other winkelwagen-users who ended up with an empty winkelwagen due to the closed website that they could hope to find new tickets, unwanted tickets to be precise, in the coming days. Annemie works as a teacher. So it was no wonder that with all this brain power in one country they decided to start an Excel-file with the bought-and-interesting-tickets, the bought-and-too-far-away-tickets and the bought-and-maybe-interesting-to-others-tickets. Lars and me, we were somewhat terrified about all this mess and had the impression that maybe despite all this bookkeeping, accounting and the application of operations research methods and optimization techniques there was a certain probability that we could be outside. But two fans who are responsible for major fan websites should be able to distribute tickets and keep their winkelwagen in order.

Vienna presale

Austria provides Europe with a certain flavour of the good old world with style, coffee and biscuits, well-behaved gentlemen and a German accent which lets every word sound like a compliment. In the good old days without internet and even without fax, maybe with a messenger on horseback, what did you to order your tickets? Step back in time and imagine you being a king or queen wishing to see the Queen herself. Of course, you pick up the telephone, dial the number of the Wiener Stadthalle and ask about the presale which should start on Friday. Poor Sid faced the tragedy of paying long-distance calls across the continent and the mountains for surely hours and hours because we were absolutely sure that after this chaos in Belgium, the presale in Austria could not be better. Therefore, we did not want to wait until 10:00 in the morning of the next day. We phoned them already on Thursday. And guess what, it was one of these unusual phone calls which we could only repeat for the three Hamburg shows.

A woman answered the phone, I asked about the tickets, the price ("The cheapest category..." - "No, just tell me the most expensive and tell me if I can buy with my credit card.") and the presale organization of the oncoming day. The unusal answer was "Oh, if you like I can pencil you in for the presale. What kind of tickets do you want?" I gave her all the necessary information, said thank you and good-bye.

Lars can be so suspicious, so critical, it is unbelievable. As if he was not born in the middle of the 70s (last century, don't oversee this one here!), and as if his mother had not booked the holiday lodges in southern France by phone - in fluent French, of course. Well, he was relieved that we would have a nice breakfast without any interruptions but could not trust in this woman. To be honest, I did not show my own mistrust in the Austrian management techniques and customer service quality - esp. not for German tourists waving with their credit card.

But if you believe in the happiness of the past, you can believe in Austria. We were sitting in a caf� in Gent during the same when the phone rang, and I have to put a special emphasis on this minor detail because in Germany you would have to phone them at least three times, would have been caught in the endless loop of an cost-intensive call-center-telephone-software and would have had the chance to talk to a student not knowing that TINA was the queen and the goddess herself. But no, the Wiener Stadthalle in the personification of a gentleman called back and double-checked the details and promised to - you won't believe this and even I could not trust my ears in this phase of the conversation - call again with a confirmation. I was impressed.

It is of no use to inform you about the last details of this small episode : he called me again indeed, he confirmed everything again and sent an email with a somewhat peculiar HTML-attachment instead of a PDF-file but we had our tickets. - Oh yes, after all this praise-the-Austrians-for-their-customer-service-stuff it was Lars who - Mr. Scrooge in person - found out that all the service had its price: a price of 75€, to be deducted from my credit card.

The credit card-scandal

You might have noticed that my credit card had a certain value for me and my friends in these presale activities. If you live in the US or at least outside Germany, you won't surely find anything uncommon in this value. But you don't pay by credit card in my home country because you use instead your normal bank card. A sign for coming of age and entering the world of endless shopping and flying away ... no to see TINA but to lay in the sun on a beach on the side of the globe is it then to ask your bank clerk about the possibilities to get such a wonderful item as a credit card. Well, I have a VISA card, golden and shining and glimmering, of course, with the infinite amount of 5000 Euros. I only know a very small group of people having such an amount for their personal needs and I never needed it before. Well, there were several special highlights concerning my famous credit card.

As Sid, Lars and I worked together as a team or - economically speaking - as a consumer group it was necessary to ease the buying process for all participants. The first step consisted in creating a ticketmaster-profile with this credit card which esp. Sid and I used for the whole US presale. We kept booking and booking and I got only then suspicious about the possibility of reaching the incredible high sum of 5K€ when the tour developed and new concerts were added on a daily basis. Therefore, I had to ask my consultant from the bank to raise the amount to an even more incredible 7K€ which was accepted and done within a few hours. As a now even richer man I did not fear anything. The trust in our group was enormous. A real highlight was the phone call of Lars when I was in the street on a way to a course of mine. He informed that the presale for Cologne 3 had begun. Well, I could have started up my notebook and I could have used my UMTS-internet-modem right now in the street but everything seemed too late because when it comes to presale in this tour, every second counts. But no, I did not have to hurry. Lars just informed you: "I already booked tickets. No problem, super seats. I only wanted to tell you that I've used y-o-u-r credit card." Well, yes, of course, thank you, and don't forget to buy yourself the new James-Bond-DVD-collection on Amazon.

The trust was indeed enormous and was shaken profoundly when I picked up my new pair of glasses. Normally, it is not such a special moment for me to pick up new window panes because I change them daily but this time, the newly opened store in a huge shopping mall in Essen caused more trouble than a reduction of 200% could have healed. What has happened? My golden, shimmering, glimmering and shining credit card was not able to pay the - in comparison with the whole pile of tickets - ridiculous sum for my new front window. Super, fantastic, thank you VISA. The shop floor assistant and all her colleagues (three like the three witches in a Shakespearian drama) stood around the holy machine for the electronic payment, could not explain the failure and esp. not the error message. The little receipt did not say "wrong code" or "not enough money", oh no, it simply referenced a strange entity like the "security service" and the mysterious number of 200. In case you encounter the error number 200 after buying too many TINA tickets than be warned: your social environment selling binoculars to you will only be able to make you shiver, quiver and tremble in fear. Within a second I was alarmed and all the long-forgotten instincts that we inherited from our ancestors 7KY (years not Yen, and normally I pay in Euros, haha) came back to life. Suddenly, all my good manners were gone and I have the shop phone in my hands in order to phone the 0180-service number which was directly printed on the credit card. "If you search for assistance, press the 3. If you are in trouble and people could kill due to Oprah-presale-failure, call M for Mom. If you want to talk to someone like God, press 66." It was very simple, I began to remember my education and was at the edge of asking if I could use the telephone when I heard the sentence: "And now enter your multizillionneverusedbefore phone operation secret code." Okay, this was indeed no solution to the world and the real demanding problems therein. I then urged the shop assistants to torture which was left of their brains in order to find out if the error was due to the card or to their machine and what this error code 200 could mean. As they pretended to be sure that I was responsible for me, Lars and Sid not being seeing TINA in the USA, I decided that it was better to make a run for the bank, not to rob or steal but to find our immediately about the credit card and all the most important transactions of the last days.

When I entered the bank I did not wait in the entrance hall and queued with the normal, standard, average and not-TINA-enlightened other customers. Not at all, I run up the stairs, directly to the desk of my consultant who was not there. As the office hours were nearly over and as I needed an answer concerning my account within seconds - it was a matter of life and death - I had to approach a colleague of him. He did not understand the exact circumstances but I provided him with the necessary information. It was interesting to see all the secret bank software and the records in my profile but there were not transactions booked so far and everything looked normal. He even phoned another colleague of him who worked directly in the credit card department or had a deeper insight into the basis technologies and business concepts of credit cards. Together they tried to convince me that my profile looked exactly as all profiles in their customer database and that absolutely nothing could be told about my bookings not being successful. Their explanations were very friendly; they showed understanding and comfort but I needed more.

Therefore, I entered the next big shop around the corner and queued at the first cash desk I could find. After the situation, I reflected my own behaviour and, of course, the reaction of the shop assistant, and I must admit that we still live in a world and time of love and understanding. My question was - holding the golden card in my hands -: "Can you use this credit card for zero Euros and check whether it works?" I cannot even formulate all the complicated if-clauses that would have been necessary to convince me at the cash desk in order to fulfil this alarming and surely criminal request. He renounced to deduct the 0€ but told me that I could buy even a cheap item from his department. Maybe he should not have been this cheap because I chose something for 69 Cents in order do verify the credit card. Certainly, the fee for VISA was even higher than the whole turnover but it was a very easy proof: the card was still alive and rolling on the river.

To terminate this episode: friendly as I am, I phoned the optician in order to tell her that it was her machine which caused the error. She did not want to believe it and showed not sign of interested. Apparently, they had forgotten to do anything about the problem because when I finally picked up my new glasses, their first question was: "What was wrong with your credit card?"

As we were using my credit card for the whole American presale and as we used it simultaneously by two or even three persons you can surely estimate that the data pattern we were creating consisted of strange coincidences. One can imagine how the same web-shop and nearly the same transaction (apart from the city, of course) were repeated several times on one day and several times during the whole Oprah-presale. It must have been looked as if the same person was able to use multiple computers and, in addition to that, even multiple keyboards at the same time in order to book Los Angeles and Chicago precisely at the same second. Well, to sum it up, several days after the whole Oprah presale and having spent more than 3K$ for the tickets I got a proof that everything was fantastic with our tickets. This proof was somehow strange but what else could I have expected in this tour with a picture from 1990 in a silhouette and the font and colour scheme from 2005 together in one People-Magazine-advertisement (not to mention the fact that this tour was the first nameless tour in TINA's career)? Yes, you're right, it could nothing else to be more expected than a personal call from the VISA company's subsidiary in Frankfurt (the German bank centre) itself during my office hours. It was very difficult to talk to a person from this shop where I bought my new pair of glasses, even impossible to verify if I had bought anything during the last days when I was at my bank, but now, after laying out such a vast amount of clues, VISA itself could not withdraw itself any longer. There was a woman on the phone asking me whether I was myself which - I had to admit that one here - was only too true, yes, I was myself speaking to her. Then she assured me that nothing has gone wrong but that they had detected unusual and peculiar patterns in the transactions. There was one particular transaction over and over again with the same company resp. ticketmaster.com in the last days. I had never thought about being trapped in a fraud detection software or at least behaving so strange in the internet that the brick-and-mortar-world caught sight of it.

Before she could explain exactly what has caused all this mess I interrupted her and told her: "Oh, my God, you are surely referring to all these ticketmaster-sales in the last days, aren't you?" I hoped to show that indeed everything was quite correct. After the phone call and after I had told the whole story to several friends I was entertained by stories which made it clear that it is possible that the credit card company simply renounces all transactions from a certain point on. In this case all the succeeding transaction could not have been performed - imagine what this situation had caused for a strange solution to all our financial problems: no credit card, no tickets and no financial chaos. Well, of course, this was not very acceptable for us so that I was happy to clear the situation and the strange data patterns in her registry.

German presale

The German presale was to start at a Friday at 9:00. This was a major issue for us because we had free accommodation in two cities and could rely on very short travel time. Furthermore, it was clear somehow that the announced concerts could be enhanced quite well. In the end, there were sometimes three concerts in one city which is, of course, very easy to organize: one only has to stay in the same place for several days. I was quite clear that I would be at work resp. at my desk in front of the computer far before the scheduled time due to my excitement and the possibility to catch the best worm. During the Thursday evening before one of the most important Friday mornings of this year I was at home writing a new book when suddenly the telephone rang and - I have to stress that here - one of the most important messages in the whole year could be heard in a somehow shaky and excited voice. It was Marcin from England who informed me in a very short and nearly military sentence: "The presale has started. Everything is on sale." Well, I could not have been more stunned if he had said that the world had finally transformed into a round disc in the shape of TINA's silhouette from 1990. Even I am totally lacking in a military education I knew that now only a strong man's attitude or - even better - the attitude of a soldier is now required to catch the remaining worms after the early bird had already taken the best ones.

I thanked him very briefly, hammered the URL of the eventim.de-website into the address line of the browser and phoned Lars. As the website did not appear before I had ended typing the address, I decided that using the UMTS-modem was not the best of all technical possibilities. While Lars answered the phone I ran into the corridor and entered the little sports room we are having at home. There, the computer was on which is during normal days a bad mischief of my boyfriend but was today very useful (don't tell him that it was useful because otherwise I can not complain any longer about this very bad behaviour). "Don't laugh", I told Lars, "the presale is on. Go to eventim right now. It's urgent." Well, it was pretty urgent so that I called Sid in Belgium, too, and he was shocked, too, that the presale had already started - 12 hours earlier than expected.

In the days before this presale we had distributed the different shows which were already available so that everyone had only one or two shows to concentrate on. The only problem was that I had forgotten if I was responsible for Cologne 1 or Cologne 2. I was quite sure that I had nothing to do with Berlin - although I have very much to do with Berlin in my normal life. More over, I had forgotten my user name and password which was not too bad because I sent it to my mailbox. And then in addition to that - yes, I was somewhat under stress because this was a really all-or-nothing-situation - I only realized that there is a direct booking possibility offered by this website which I normally use and which I had used in the past on many occasions when I phoned with Sid again for asking my responsibilities. Of course, you should not think that you cannot rely on me. Oh no, if I don't know what tickets I should buy, I will put all tickets available in my winkelwagen which is called warenkorb in German. But well, what is a warenkorb if we have a winkelwagen under our thumb? No, I had seen immediately that the chosen tickets would remain for 18 minutes (can you imagine 18 minutes when you think you will die from stress within the next 18 seconds?) so that I could use different tabs in my browser in order to give the ticket distributor several chances to give me the best ones. Well, but this was not necessary because Sid informed me that my own fav website for buying tickets due to the Saalplanbuchung offered a Saalplanung and that the Saalplanbuchung was very simple to use. I immediately opened new tabs in order to start several sessions.

After we had discussed the pro and cons of the Saalplanbuchung I was able to pick super fantastic tickets for both Cologne shows which I bought because Sid was not clear how to open Lars's account he was using for double-checking mine and his tickets. Well, we ended up with too many tickets for nearly all the German shows because we could not decide which seats were the best although they were all perfect and the best of the whole tour. After several more phone calls during the described 18 minutes I have learnt that Marcin's valuable piece of information had spread among the fan community. When everything was over and I was soaked with sweat due to all this hard mental work of spending 160€ on each ticket I phoned him because I wanted to find out who or what was in reality responsible for his deep knowledge of pre-presales. He was phoning with a German friend in Frankfurt/Oder (a small Frankfurt without banks at the German/Polish border) in order to plan the oncoming presale and to distribute the tasks. His fan friend was not quite sure if they needed to make a phone conference at 9:00 or 10:00 during the Friday morning so he visited the eventim-website and began to scream. Surely, I don't need to tell you what he screamed...

Jumping Jack Flash

Even with our good tickets in hand we were not completely satisfied. There was still Vienna with one pair of tickets in the front of stage section which is called "orchestra" in Europe. Or the terrible Paris-situation with its row 21 for both nights. Therefore, we joined in a very new kind of sports activity for Tina concerts: jumping across the venue months before the show. The rule is very simple: if you have more tickets than you need or if you have tickets you don�t want anymore, you don�t offer them on ebay first, but you ask the community if someones needs your tickets. In case you have better ones than somebody else, you can be sure that you can give these tickets away and get better ones for another show. Sometimes, it is necessary to do all the things which have caused the crisis of the finance maket in 2008/9: offer tickets you don�t have (now) but which you can obtain (soon) or to bid both an auction, bargain for "direct sale" and wait for someone to call you. It is a massive activity which can only be performed by the hardest of the strongest (or the other way round, I am not sure here) because you will have around 1000 Euros worth in tickets you don�t need for yourself at home.

Paris	We were the first persons online for Paris, and still we only could buy tickets for row 21. This was not what we needed but as the concerts were sold out within a very short time we thought we could only be happy to have any tickets at all. But then a message from Sid reached us asking if we would like to have a row 1 for each night. These tickets came from Sjef who could not make it to Paris because of school (and his mother as you can imagine). We only had to distribute the two tickets so that we had one ticket for row 21 and one for row 1. We needed to separate because Lars had the second night in row 1 and me me the first one. We got each two tickets for rows 5 and 8 because they were only sold in pairs on ebay. As they were not directly on the floor we still were not satisfied with the situation. After I had sold my two tickets for row 21, I decided that row 8 was still too far away from Tina. Luckily, Lars found out that Ingrid was selling one of her pair of tickets on the night I was looking for. It was a ticket for row 2 on the floor which was, of course, very interesting - just because of Ingrid, of course. Therefore, my journey ended from twice 21 to 1 and 2.
Vienna	We were very unhappy with our tickets for the Saturday show. In the first place, we thought it was luck that we were able to book the tickets via telephone but in the end we found out that the Saturday tickets were not even in the best category but that they had charged an incredible sum for the phone service - which I had praised a lot as a good service after the transaction, grrr. We had more ebay searches active than the "my profile"-database could sustain but in the end we could get rid of the row-25-far-in-the-back-tickets.
Hamburg	We had our tickets from eventim, and we ended with tickets from eventim so ebay had nothing to do with Hamburg. Nevertheless, we were constantly unhappy with Hamburg - not because of the bad wheather but because of the first five rows which were not available. Lars had bought tickets for one night in this section for us directly from the local tour promoter but it was not possible to buy tickets in this section for the other shows. Suddenly, we got a message from Dirk complaining that suddenly, only two weeks before the shows the tickets for the first five rows were available. While he was unsure whether to buy new tickets and sell the first ones we ended up with more tickets we needed and could even choose between row 1 (left) or row 2 (middle).
Dublin	In the first place, we did not even know that we would go to Dublin because this O2 presale in UK and Ireland did not help us in any way to get good tickets. Therefore, we wanted to skip the islands. During the interview for the "Neue Ruhr Zeitung" at my place I said that we were thinking about going to Ireland. Lars did not know that we were even thinking about it but the poison was now spreading his mind until he was sure that it was only a matter about tickets. As these were the last two concerts of the whole tour and as they would take place on the Easter weekend no extra holiday was required. The acquisition of the tickets was, of courrse, mentionable because we ended up with four tickets - four for each show for the two of us. What has happened? During an urgend phone conference after we had booked the hotel and the flights Lars said: "Oh, I will propose this ebay-seller a price which is not too high. Maybe you should participate in this auction there, but only with the lowest offer." "But what if I win the auction and your seller accepts the price?", I asked but Lars was completely sure (you know now who is to blame for the whole chaos and the shortage of good tickets on the market) that either somebody would outbid me by one euro or that the seller of the other pair of tickets would not accept his offer. Moreover, these two things were not supposed to happen at the same time. On the contrary, they were mutually exclusive and, furthermore, it was for sure that we would end with the better pair of tickets in our hands. Well, the short version of the story is that Lars's seller accepted the deal within several hours and that I won the auction within several days just like that without any other interaction. Funny was that we learned from our errors and did it again in order to make sure how silly this is... We kept the Platinum Tickets and had then the first and only ones for us of the whole tour - and this at the final shows - not bad, is it?