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On Tuesday morning, Ruben Martinez Jr. was staring at his computer screen,

He was on a group chat trying to strategize the best way to score Taylor Swift tickets

and it was looking bleak. Everyone seemed to have 2,000-

plus people ahead of them in line. Martinez, a software engineer at OkCupid,

checked the browser developer tools to see if he could figure out his actual place in the queue.

He thought he could find a percentage for how far back he was.

What he didn’t expect to see was the exact number he’d pulled when he got in line, 23,913, and

the number of people in front of him who hadn’t bowed out or gotten tickets: 13,759. Soon

Ticketmaster sent a message to those waiting that it was pausing the queue.