The seven stages of trying to buy Olympic tickets

If you've tried to get Olympic tickets in the past few weeks, you'll have been through the seven stages of Ticketmaster-powered despair. Due to the ultra-high demand, there are literally minutes between Locog releasing them on to the site and their being snapped up. It's so speedy, the site can't tell what is and what isn't available. Which makes life difficult. Here, then, is the heptathlon of unsuccessful ticket-buying.

Hope With no official way of telling when new batches of tickets are to be released (though the website 2012ticketalert.com is doing a sterling job), logging on to the London 2012 ticket site is always a hopeful experience. Surely, those spare 100m-final tickets are about to go up.

Shock Would-be ticket buyers are often amazed to see that fantastic tickets seem to be available at non-bonkers prices. Quick! Click!

Anticipation At this point comes the "Requesting Tickets" page, on which "reserving" tickets is subject to a 15-minute wait – as it did when extra athletics seats were released on Wednesday – can seem more like a British Rail "15 minutes" than an actual one.

Denial "No ticket matches found." Anger: "BUT YOU SAID THEY WERE THERE. SORT YOUR LIFE OUT, SEBASTIAN COE."

Desperation After several rounds of this, the idea of paying £300 for two tickets to a volleyball match between Canada and Australia becomes totally sensible. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event, after all. Hope (II): "Requesting Tickets…"

Repeat nightly for next 10 days…