I generally consider myself a modernist. I hate confining myself to an old way of doing something if I know a better or more efficient way exists. In almost any scenario you could name, I would be against blindly sticking with a bad system only because that's how it's always been done.
But I have now learned there are exceptions to that rule.
I was in London a few weeks ago, and at some point while scurrying around trying to find a tube station, I walked passed a pub that was streaming the day's Wimbledon matches. Having totally forgotten that the tournament had started that day, I loitered around for a bit and watched some of the coverage. It took me a few minutes to look down at my feet and remember, "Holy crap! I'm in London! Wimbledon is in London! I could go to these matches tomorrow!"
So for the next few hours I was scrolling through whatever random Reddit forums I could find trying to learn the best way to get day-of Wimbledon tickets. Unbeknownst to me, Wimbledon has a pretty infamous system for this.
It's called "The Queue." Basically, the majority of Wimbledon tickets for the main courts are sold via a lottery system named the Public Ballot where people around the world can enter for a chance to get tickets to that year's tournament. But Wimbledon also sets aside thousands of grounds passes and 500 tickets at each of the three main "show courts" to be sold every day of the tournament to fans willing to wait in-line for hours on end outside the gates for a chance to buy a ticket to that day's action. Many of these fans camp out overnight in tents to make sure they're in prime position to get one of the coveted show court tickets.
Trying to get a Wimbledon ticket this way was just absurd enough for me to have a massive crush on the idea, so I did just that. I woke up the next morning at 3:45 am. I rented a Lime Bike and made the seven mile trek from my Kensington hostel to Wimbledon Park, arriving right around 4:45 am. And still half-asleep and utterly convinced I was walking into something disastrous, I scanned the long line of tennis fans already waiting out in the field, and when I found the end of the line, I claimed my place as the new caboose. I was promptly handed a queue card by someone in a vest confirming I was the 1,198th person in line. At 4:45 am.
The next six hours are all sort of a blur. I laid back down and tried to get some sleep. I listened to some comedy albums and watched The Office. Sometime between 6 and 7 am, the organizers of the queue began waking everyone up and getting us in position to actually start walking toward the gates. They came around with wrist bands that designated whether we'd have a chance to buy one of the sought after show court tickets or if we'd have to settle for grounds passes (thankfully, I was early enough in the line to get a seat at Court No. 2). And somehow, by no explanation other than divine intervention itself, the gates to the park opened at 10 am, and we were all brought up to the registers one at a time to actually purchase our tickets, and I got in. At 4:45 am, I was absolutely certain I was lighting a day of my London trip on fire. By 10:30 am, I was eating strawberries and cream inside the Wimbledon gates with a front row ticket to Court No. 2 in my hand.
The Wimbledon Queue is an absolutely absurd construct nowadays. We have technological solutions for this now. We could so easily do a digital queue with an appointment window to enter the tournament so people aren't waiting around all day. We could absolutely modernize the crap out of it and give everyone back seven hours of their lives and mitigate a lot of back pain caused by park grass naps. You can fill a spiral notebook with all the ideas for more efficient ways to do this.
But that morning of waiting around was half the experience for me. Everyone was so excited to be getting into the tournament and chit-chatting in line about what they're looking forward to. Strangers who would never otherwise have crossed paths now had seven hours to learn about each other's lives. It was a comically inefficient and dated system, but does that matter? I enjoyed it. It had a charm to it. And ditching all of that to wait in a digital queue at a coffee shop just would've felt...stale.
It was a pleasant reminder that not everything has to be built purely with efficiency in mind. Sometimes sacrificing efficiency for character or charm or humor pays off. People value cool experiences, and digitizing every single thing we do as humans makes for some pretty boring experiences.
Thank you, Wimbledon, for building the stupidest ticketing service I've ever used to remind me of this.
Comments