The group stage of the World Cup is over. 16 teams have survived just to face elimination from here on end, while the other 16 are heading home. Some get favourable calls, while others get the shaft (just look at the Italy-Croatia game). The football being played in the Far East has been mainly great in the first 2 weeks of the competition, with more exciting matches to come in the coming 2 weeks. In order to give you readers a better coverage of the event, mathNEWS has sent a massive reporting team of one to the Far East.
Due to budget limitations, our reporter, Mark McDermot, was not provided a plane ticket. He left the comfortable confines of his office, MC 7056, in April and hitchhiked his way to Vancouver. There he sneaked onto a ship headed to Korea. He hid himself in the supply room and fed himself whenever he needed food. His exercise consisted of crawling in the air ducts (whenever a crew got into the supply room).
After an arduous journey on the ship, Mark landed in Korea, two months after he left Waterloo. Upon landing, Mark realized that he lost the Official Press Badge that mathNEWS provided him (mathNEWS blew this term's budget on bidding for the right to be in the press gallery). Weary and badge-less, Mark set out to begin doing what we sent him to do.
Denied access into the stadium, Mark decided to interview the players as they got on or off the bus. However, all his interview requests were denied, and the coaches shoved him. Disappointed by the player's reaction, he went to interview the fans attending the games. There he realized that many fans did not obtain tickets from the computer system. The fans told Mark that when they went to claim the tickets that they already paid for, the computer system that runs the ticket-issuing system did not recognize them. To find the the root cause of the problem, Mark set out to undertake an investigation.
He spent days interviewing fans and other members of the media and found that, according to FIFA, the ticketing system was a British-made product. However, Mark was skeptical about it and went further in his investigation. He conversed with locals and they led him to a business building. There he found the source of the ticket backlogs. It turned out that the British-made software was running an algorithm that PeopleSoft (the proud maker of QUEST) made. Upon further review, Mark found that the FIFA software and QUEST are essentially the same application. Employing his quick wits and a few people that he met in an Internet cafe hours earlier, Mark successfully removed QUEST from the ticketing program and installed a bug-free system in place of it. Now people can actually obtain their tickets.
After vanquishing his foe, Mark plans to travel around the country and see what it has to offer. He also told mathNEWS that he will try to do what we sent him to do and sneak into a few games. How does he get back to Waterloo? He can take care of that when the World Cup's over. After all, he got there with practically nothing (and we have no money to pay for his trip home).
Jason "the Screamer" Lau