Thousands of Glastonbury fans have been left with a wasted Sunday morning as poor planning meant they didn’t get a fair chance to  buy tickets.

Take Anna, for example (pictured). She got up at 8.30am, on a Sunday, to begin her mission to secure tickets for Glastonbury 2011. Joining her, across London, were five of her friends also trying to buy tickets for Britain’s premier music festival.

At 9am the trying begins; browsers are constantly refreshed and four separate phones are redialled every few seconds in a bid to spend the £195 per ticket. By 1.20pm tickets are declared sold out. For Anna – who’s never been to Glastonbury – her five teammates and thousands of others it’s a disillusioning experience, leaving behind bitter tastes.

Throughout the morning, Glastonbury’s Twitter page updated hopeful festival-goers with messages of hope that despite the difficulties, tickets are being sold and everyone should all keep trying. Despite this, websites remained uninterested and the phone lines engaged.

Tickets website Seetickets.com dealt with the online sales. It did a fine job of showing us a failed connection error, proving it wasn’t even remotely ready for the demand.

If only the Glastonbury organisers knew, somehow, that its festival would be this popular. If only there had been some hint. Oh, wait, there was… Every year previous. I guess you really can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

Why couldn’t Anna and her friends get through? Were the phone exchanges over-run? Was Seetickets.com out of bandwidth too quickly? Did the massive surge of users over-power Seeticket’s servers? Maybe there was a problem with the London telephone exchanges, or the one nearer Glastonbury HQ.

Perhaps British Telecom will turn round and apologise for the lack of support, explaining that demand was amazing or massive and that it did its best to cope with it all. It’s so easy to apologise after the fact though, just ask Bill Clinton.

“We’re very sorry to those of you who didn’t get tickets, and acknowledge there were some issues with the website/phoneline due to the sheer volume of people trying to get through,” puffed Michael and Emily Eavis, owners of the festival.

Those who did manage to buy tickets are the winners of an uncharacterised lottery; a random set of circumstances, the rules of which are explained to no one.

Simply put, it comes down to poor planning. Hopefully Anna, and others like her, can find re-sales through the Glastonbury site in Spring next year. Or, more likely, they’ll go to a different festival.

But that isn’t the point. All Anna wanted was a fair chance to buy her tickets but despite all the preparation that was too much to ask.

The sad part it that demand is so high fans will come pouring back to try again for the next one. If this instils the organisers with an apathetic approach to its ‘modern’ booking system the first ones to suffer will be Anna and all the thousands of others like her.

Bleets Emily Eavis; “Sorry those of you who waited on the lines but couldn’t get tickets. Wish there was a way to fit everyone in.” No, Emily. Wish for a farer, better prepared way to let people get these rare tickets.

Bad, Glastonbury. Bad! Maybe the old dog will figure this out for the next one, in 2013. Happy hoping, music fans.