Tickets to Taylor Swift’s highly anticipated “1989 World Tour” instantly became scarce the moment they hit the market. This prompted Swift to add a third show at Saint Paul’s Xcel Energy Center after her previously scheduled September 11 and 12 appearances. Because of this at 11:55A.M, on Friday, December 5, 2014, I rushed down to the library for my free hour, attempting to figure out how to pull off getting Taylor Swift tickets.

The pre-sale didn’t start until 12, and over the course of the five minutes leading up to high noon, I found myself horribly unprepared. I realized in those five minutes that I needed to figure out how to log in to my Ticketmaster account, find the special pre-sale password––buried somewhere in the untamed jungle of my email inbox––and figure out where I’d stashed my dad’s credit card number. At 11:57, I still didn’t have any of these things done.
I logged onto the site and ended up waiting over an hour for my tickets to load, while the timer read “10 minutes” the entire time.

I ended up going through three different combinations of tickets and gave up a set of front row tickets out of fear there would be an obstructed view; I think it was mostly me being paranoid, but I digress. According to the seat map of Xcel––which I’d been studying religiously for over nine months––the seats we ended up with looked like they were at a ridiculous angle and, as a result, gave me something to worry about.

It’s hard to believe that nine months have passed since I bought my tickets, and that I actually got to go see T-Swizzle in concert this past month. It was totally worth every second (or rather hour) I spent online trying to get the tickets.