You wouldn't think it, visiting this website, but technology isn't everything. There's also beer, for example. And music. Then there's the Glastonbury Festival . And these days, you need to be into all three of the aforementioned things to attend Michael Eavis' farm in late June (well, maybe not beer, but it helps).

Buying tickets to Europe's most respected music festival has now become so convoluted that you need to be reasonably tech savvy to even think about booking. I should know, I've been seven times and can remember the days you could saunter onto the site in mid-April and buy tickets for as many people as you wanted. Those fledgling days for online Glasto ticketing are long gone. Shame perhaps, but it kinda represents a challenge.

Albeit a challenge that, one day, I'll lose out on. But you have to try, so this is the story of how I fared yesterday.

As you may know, the festival implemented a new registration system this year, meaning that everybody that wanted to go needed to register during Feburary and get a reference number. This is an anti-touting effort and, as you'll see, hardly helps to speed up the process of online ordering. It also gave some indication of the task ahead; 395,000 registered, for 145,000 tickets. So that, I reasoned, was a one in three chance.

Getting tickets now needs more planning than the festival itself - as if a test to see if you can cut the mustard and earn your right to admission. Due to my rather lucky position here on Tech.co.uk I was able to get hold of an assortment of laptops. A Vista-sporting Dell model, a rugged old Acer I've had floating around for years, my corporate Dell laptop, my own G4 Mac PowerBook and also a Lenovo ultraportable. We also had access to a desktop PC at my friend Tristan's house. The reason for going round to his was simple; he has 10Mb broadband. His mum also cooks a cracking roast dinner.

By 8.50am on Sunday I was sat at the laptops on the floor of Tristan's room with my girlfriend Leila and my friend Catherine, with Tristan at the desktop. Laptops ready, browsers open, shortcuts made. Look top right and there we are...

At 9am the race was on. And, as is usual, nothing happened. You don't even get graced with a 'we're busy' page at this time. Nothing loads. There's just get a blank and a sluggishly-moving status bar. It's the kind of blank that makes you think it's just not going to happen. Thankfully, experience is a friend - you've just got to sit it out.

Messages from friends came through Windows Live Messenger to spread anxiety. Sam said he was getting nowhere - even at work in Central London with its fat business broadband pipes. Other friends were having precious little luck either.

At 9.16am Catherine managed to get onto the initial page.

At this stage the battle is nowhere near over, but getting this page is a BIG milestone. You see, like a sluice gate, access is restricted to the initial page to enable the rest of the process to function correctly. Clever certainly, frustrating definitely.

At this point let's rewind slightly. The on-sale date three years ago was easily the worst day ever for Glastonbury ticketing.

Cause: As each order went through the site, the servers at SeeTickets (or WayAhead as I think they were then) struggled to marry the card details with the booking database to book the transaction and dish out an order reference.