Peter Griffin: Why I still haven't found what I'm looking for

I had all the bases covered. I wasn't going to have to queue all night to buy tickets to see my favourite band, U2. I had three mobile phones, third-generation mobile phones, at my disposal to blitz the Ticketmaster 0800 line. I had a wireless high-speed internet connection on my laptop to beat my slower rivals to the booking website.

As I swaggered into a Post Shop in central Wellington at 8.30am on Monday, I had the words of my favourite U2 song, Zoo Station, in my head: "I'm ready for the shuffle, ready for the deal, ready to let go of the steering wheel".

But I also had insurance - the country's high-speed communications networks at my disposal. I had "the Edge", so to speak. Sure, I was in the queue, but only to offer moral support to my fellow fans.

The first sign of trouble came when I fired up my laptop and loaded the Ticketmaster website.

Attempts to log in were greeted with the message: "Our system is currently busy due to a large event on sale. We apologise for the inconvenience."

At 9am on the dot the silent selling frenzy began. I juggled my three phones, to the sniggers of others in the queue. I began dialling - engaged and disconnected tones beeped at me. I balanced my laptop on my knee. Still busy.

Behind the counter, bemused Post Shop staff shrugged and waited for the overloaded booking system to untangle itself. It never did.

At 9.16am, someone up ahead in the queue got through on the phone. She was on a low-end, low-speed Nokia! All my high-speed gear meant nothing.

A few passersby who'd never heard of U2 stood staring in the window.

"Has the dollar gone through the floor? Is Kiwibank going under?" they must have thought. People around me complained that Ticketmaster's system had crashed. It hadn't crashed, it was just being selective and Wellington wasn't in favour.

At 9.25 the game was up - sold out. I put away my fancy phones, shut down my laptop and trudged home. All I could do was take comfort in the fact that thousands of others had also been let down by the technology.

There was the heartbreaking story of "lifelong U2 fan" Tina Raymond, who queued all night outside a Post Shop in New Plymouth to make sure she was the first to the ticket counter. Like me, she watched in agony as staff tried unsuccessfully to access Ticketmaster's website.

So distraught was poor Tina at having missed out that the sympathetic Post Shop workers put some tickets aside for her when they became available later in the day. But her phone battery had gone flat from constantly calling the Ticketmaster 0800 line. Unable to contact her, Post Shop eventually flogged the tickets to someone else.

In reality, there were no computer crashes. As with Ticketek in Australia, Ticketmaster throttled its system so it wouldn't collapse under the weight of numbers. It was first come, first served and all the high-tech gadgetry at my disposal wasn't going to help me.

But the ticket touts on TradeMe offered to - at a hugely inflated price. By Monday afternoon the tickets that sold for $99 to $199 were attracting bids several times those figures.

The bidding has since been furious, but the U2 ticket auctions on TradeMe are the most divisive series of auctions I've ever seen on the site. For every member savaging the scalpers, there's another commending them on their support of free market economics.

"It is not illegal to sell these tickets, so I don't know what they are moaning about. I bet if they scored extra ones, they would sell them on here for higher prices too!" said one member.

"I hope you bunch of vultures choke on your profits. Swine," wrote another.

There was even intelligent debate around politics and macroeconomic theory: "Scalping is not illegal, you know why? Cos we're not communists! It's a free economy."

Even with the announcement of a second show, the bids keep creeping up. Maybe it's the fact that Bono and the boys chose St Patrick's Day for their first show here in over a decade that has people feverish for tickets to that show.

The exact same thing is happening on auction site Ebay.com.au.

Whatever it is, we're going to have to get used to this type of online enterprise. Auction houses such as TradeMe aren't going to stop the reselling of tickets, and rightly so. The U2 ticket "scalping", for want of a better word, represents the online marketplace at its most efficient. This is what TradeMe is all about.

At least the website goes to the trouble of conducting "moral surveys" to gauge public opinion on such matters. In October, one such survey found that 85 per cent of members agreed that concert ticketholders should be allowed to auction them off.

It might be a different story if the U2 gig was a charity event. In July the organiser of the Live8 concert in London, Sir Bob Geldof, was urging hackers to attack eBay. He was angry that eBay was allowing tickets to the star-studded charity gig that had been given away in a lottery to be resold for huge sums online, with money going not to charity but to the scalpers. You could understand his outrage.

But even with more commercially minded ventures, do people deserve to make huge profits on tickets just because they were lucky enough to log on to the website first, get through to the phone operator or be at the front of the queue? The answer is yes, because by and large that's the system we value. And while the system increasingly runs on computers, the best technology isn't going to help you beat it.