Every Penn State senior who thought, “This is my fourth time buying football tickets. It’ll be NBD.” was in for a shock when they logged on to the Student Ticket Account Manager this morning.

Athletics rolled out a new system on Ticketmaster this year. The new system, which has students join a waiting room and queue beginning at 6:45 a.m., heightened what was already one of the most nerve-wracking mornings of the year. Today, senior tickets sold out in 28 minutes, making what was already a stressful sprint a stressful distance run with a Thomas 100 class’s worth of other students in front of you.

Instead of clicking refresh every second beginning at 6:58 a.m., students now are assigned a place in a queue and must wait for the students ahead of them to buy their tickets first.

What’s worse: You see how many people are in front of you in line.

Although you can safely assume each undergraduate class is assigned somewhere around 5,000 tickets in the 22,000-seat student section, there’s no such thing as comfort when it comes to buying football tickets — especially when you’re stuck in line for more than 20 minutes.

Whether it be user error of adopting a new process or technology failure, there were plenty of disgruntled seniors who will either need to pay top dollar for single-game tickets or bribe an underclassman with beer to test their luck later in the week — but then again: Has there ever been a year when that wasn’t the case?

YES. I thought I wouldn’t get tickets for a hot second

— Mitchell Valentin (@ValRalTal) June 18, 2019

Even without the dreaded queue, buying student tickets will forever be a flawed system. Plus, they’re too damn high!