I’m a failure as a father. It’s not because my son was born around the same time as the first iPhone and has therefore never had my complete attention. It’s not because I swear constantly, obsess over subscriber numbers and retweets, or because I extol the importance of hard work but model the importance of sinking into a couch and watching hours of prestige TV while wearing a T-shirt with one’s own logo. All that is fine. It’s nature over nurture anyway. No, I’m a failure as a father because the one time my daughter really needed me to come through for her, I ended up on the outside looking in, banished to the barren badlands of the Taylor Swift ticket waiting list wasteland. I’ve been successfully buying concert tickets since I was a kid. Back then, it was a meritocracy. You woke up early on a Sunday morning, rode your Sekai 2400 ten speed to the record store, waited a few hours for the doors to open, and then prayed the dude manning the ticket machine could type faster than the dudes at the neighboring record stores. Now all that has moved to the Internet. Yes, the Internet, where I have spent my whole life at the expense of my kids. This was my chance to prove it was all worth it. I’m Internet enabled, Internet savvy, and Internet famous. And where did this lifetime of selling my soul for a decent WiFi connection get me? Onto Taylor’s ticket waiting list. And this is a particularly hopeless waiting list. Even the half-decent dads who got accepted into the official queue were foiled by a Ticketmaster site that was immediately trampled by a throng of Swifties and the parents who let them down. In all my years of buying tickets, from the early days waiting in front of the record store to competing online for some of the world’s biggest tours, I’ve seen some show demand. But I’ve never seen anything quite like this. If this all seems like a cheap and pathetic effort to see if there’s anyone on this list who has the connections and power to get me some decent tickets to the Taylor tour, then you’re probably reading it right.