I'd love to hear from some readers who tried to get Police tickets this morning. Assuming you tried at 10 a.m. and not noon, per the incorrect information in yesterdays's Dallas Morning News, did you have any success?

Using ticketmaster.com, I started hitting refresh at 9:59. About 45 seconds later, a message popped up saying that I had tried to access the system too frequently in a short period of time and I was now locked out of Ticketmaster for a few minutes! WTF!?! I had never had that happen before. I tried again after about a minute, and I was still locked out. Then, it occurred to me to clear my cookies of anything with "ticketmaster" in the name. Sure enough, that worked. Only now, the system told me I had a 15 minute wait time (I was trying to buy the $90 tickets - no way I'm paying $225 to see anyone. $90 is extortionist as it is). After 14 minutes, a message appeared telling me that there was a problem with my order and that I needed to try again. Of course, by this time there was no chance of buying anything online.

In a prior life (i.e., high school), I used to work for Ticketmaster, back when our local outlet was called Rainbow Ticketmaster. I spent one summer in the call center and another selling tickets in person in the main ticket center, just across the street from Pegasus News World Headquarters at Walnut Hill and Central. Those summers gave me a nice insight into the world of selling tickets, and you can imagine that I have all kinds of stories about the things I saw. On the plus side, I learned some tricks for buying tickets, a few of which still work to this day.

One such insight is that Ticketmaster holds back blocks of tickets for telephone orders. This makes sense because telephone orders naturally take longer to complete than computerized orders. So today, when I experienced the initial lockout on my computer, I had my wife call a certain Ticketmaster number (I'm not saying which one!). She got through fairly quickly, and we were able to get tickets in section 311, row A (still $90!). Those aren't fantastic seats by any stretch, but it beats getting nothing.

All in all, an interesting experience. Some thoughts:

- What was up with Ticketmaster locking me out for hitting refresh too often? When did that start happening?

- Does anyone have a clue what sections are covered by the $225, $90, and $50 price levels? Ticketmaster, of course, is intentionally vague about this.

- Did anyone else have any luck?

It's not like the Police are my favorite band or anything, but I would like to see them. I feel lucky to have tickets, even mediocre ones.

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UPDATE: Ticketmaster just added a second show the following night. Tickets are on sale now! Bastards.