Late last week, I was on the internet losing my mind.

I was trying to get my mom a COVID vaccine appointment in New York State.

But the website kept crashing, showing error messages.

I'd see an open appointment, and as I clicked on it, it would disappear.

After about five hours of frustration and a little yelling, I saw this one woman on Twitter who said she was having success

booking appointments. Later, I asked her what her secret was. I noticed in your email to me,

you said you were doing a lot of this in incognito mode because you'd

learned this trick before. How did you learn that? This is super dorky, but we, it's totally

from booking Disney vacations for my family. That's Jessica Allen.

She was looking for appointments farther north in New York State than I was, but she had cracked the system using her Disney booking knowledge.

It used to be that you had to book your dining reservations six months before your trip,

and you had to be on at a specific time in the morning and the dining reservations

would open up and like things are very competitive. Just being an incognito mode for whatever

reason, like it helps give you access to really what's available. Here's what it's like to try to get

a vaccine appointment in New York State right now.

First, you hit a screen to confirm the person is old enough or a frontline worker, that sort of thing.

Then you end up on a page with links to various locations that might have the vaccine,

either state-run sites or private pharmacies. You pick one. And only then can you try to make the actual appointment.

And that's assuming your browser hasn't crashed or that the location hasn't run out of the

vaccine in the meantime. I failed many, many times. But Jessica got really good at it.

And she figured, why stop with her parents? She kept the websites open, then called

up other family members to book them their slots, conferenced in seniors who weren't great at

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