So this is what I looked at for over an hour this morning when I was trying to get a hotel room for Comic-Con. You see, if you want to get a hotel room for a decent price you have to wait until the blocks of discounted rooms open up, which happened to be this morning. You have to use a service called Travel Planners. Several thousand other people are trying to do this at the same time. This year they created a new system that would place people in a waiting queue in the order they arrived and they would then proceed to the reservation site once a spot was open. Or so they said.

I logged in at exactly 9 AM. I was in the queue. After a couple minutes, to my joy, I made it to the reservation system. I selected my hotel choice, entered my contact information, hit next, and nothing happened. So I waited. It sort of looked like it was doing something. Eventually it did do something. It kicked me back out to the queue, where I was presumably at the back of the line again behind who knows how many thousands of people. Needless to say, I did not make it back in to the reservation system. I sat there staring at that screen of false hope for a few minutes and then began to call the phone numbers offered, only to get a busy signal.

An hour later I was getting a little tired of staring at that screen that warned me that if I refreshed or hit back I would end up at the back of the queue. The sound of countless busy signals rang in the back of my brain. I went outside to clear my head, still hitting redial on my phone every 10 seconds. Then it happened. I heard a human voice. I wanted to jump for joy. He asked for my hotel choices and my information, which I gladly gave to him. He then warned me that he was not actually the person taking reservations. He was only taking people's information, which would then be expedited to the actual reservation people in the order the information was taken. So basically it was the offline version of their marvelous new queue system. He told me they would contact me with verification sometime soon.

Several hours later I finally received an email saying my reservation didn't go through because the hotels I requested were already full. I went back to the Comic-Con site only to find out that there were only 5 hotels left available and they were all a considerable distance from the convention center and pretty high priced to boot. So that just sucks, especially since I had made it in. I should have a room. To add insult to injury, I checked various hotels sites and sure enough many of the hotels I requested to stay in still have rooms available during Comic-Con, just at astronomical prices, which I guarantee you someone out there will pay. So now I have to wait, like a little lapdog, and hope that someone will back out of their reservation and that the mass of people in front of me waiting for that spot choose not to take it.

Sorry this is such a long rant, I'm just not looking forward to sleeping in my car for a week. Thank you Trip Planners.