The company that's marketing tickets for the New York State Fair is sending representatives to Syracuse on Tuesday, to work out glitches after its first selling effort did not go smoothly this past weekend.

Etix has been the Fair's ticket manager since the beginning of the month, and tickets to the Jason Aldean and Keith Urban concerts, on sale Saturday morning, were its first test.  People began lining up 27 hours before the box office opened, and the line snaked outside the Fair main gate.  At the same time, at 9am, thousands online were also looking for tickets.  To put it mildly, there were lots of frustrated people.

Dan O'Hara, State Fair Director, says the people in line were in direct competition with the people working the web, and that, he says, explains how people at the front often did not get as good a seating choice as people behnd them.  "The person at home can actually lock up 3 or 4 or 5 tickets," he says, while debating if those are the final choice.  But, if they're unfrozen and go back to the 'pool' they offer a better choice once others access them.

The first person in line at the Fairgrounds was offered 9th row seats.  "In her instance, I'm gonna accept responsibility for it.  I waited on her," says O'Hara, who was subbing after a regular staffer had a personal emergency.  The Fair Director says he was just learning the computer system, and was not fast enough, so he's been talking with Linda Pilate, and will 'make good,' getting her better seats.

People who tried to buy online were also shut out, and O'Hara says that's a correctible mistake: 
"We pushed people to our website. We would say got to nysfair.org, go to etix and click on it. What we should have said is go right to etix because our website, our server, indicated it was slow"

The technical issues, combined with the popularity of the concerts, took their toll. "You know, it was the perfect storm," says O'Hara. "We had a new system in place. We routed people thru our website to the e tix website. You had a concert that virtually sold out in an hour."--they estimate 14,000 people tried to buy tickets in the first half hour alone.

There won't be much time to make fixes.  The Fair plans to announce a new concert either Tuesday or Wednesday, with tickets on sale shortly after.  They do not want a repeat of Saturday.