Step 1: Find a radio station that is giving away tickets. Normally, you don’t listen to this station but you will in order to win these coveted and sold-out tickets. The rules are that you have to be the 25th caller when they play any U2 song.

Step 2: Program the radio station’s phone number into your cell phone and home phone numbers’ directories.

Step 3: Start planning the cute outfit you will wear to the concert, just in case someone gives you a backstage pass and you get to meet U2 and have your picture taken with them so you can post it on your blog the next day.

Step 4: Turn on the one radio you have downstairs, located in the tuner which must be on in order for the kids to watch TV. Because it is tuned to the radio, children may not watch TV, DVDs, or play the XBox. But that is okay and good for them. They can play with their Matchbox cars, their Thomas the Tank Engine table with its miles and miles of tracks and zillions of engines. They can color, draw, make Playdoh sculptures, play dress-up, hide-and-seek, rock stars, a game they invented called “Boo’s the Goblin!”, board games (Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, Hi Ho Cherry-Oh, Husker Du, Memory, Chess), or “restaurant”. But all of those things are “BORING!” and they will whine. And whine some more.

Step 5: Only go to the bathroom during commercial breaks. Only leave the room during commercial breaks. Only use the phone during commercial breaks.

Step 6: Feel deep disappointment any time a new song starts and Bono isn’t singing. Wait three-and-a-half minutes. A new song will begin. It won’t be U2. It will be that annoying syrupy song “Daughters” again.

Step 7: Start disbelieving the DJ when he says “coming up another chance to win tickets to see U2, appearing at the Pepsi Center April 20th and 21st!”

Step 8: Consider giving up. You won’t win. You never win anything, except a sweater you won from a store at the mall when you were in high school. You still have it but you never wear it because there is a giant hole in it. Maybe you should just throw it away. But it would be a waste. It is so soft and classic. Maybe, if you learn how to knit you can fix it. Open the phone book and look for a yarn store that offers knitting classes. Pick up the phone to call them and suddenly remember that you can’t because the next song may very well be “I Still Haven’t Found What I Am Looking For”.

Step 9: What is that? The unmistakable guitar-opening of “Where The Streets Have No Name”??? Yes! Yes! Where are the phones?

Step 10: Hit the speed dial numbers in the cell and home phones—cell phone in your left hand, home phone in your right. Place one phone on each ear. Busy signals. Dial again. But they don’t dial at the same pace so within two tries you are listening to a busy signal with one ear and dialing the other phone. Then vice versa, versa vice. It gets rapidly confusing. Notice children staring. Keep dialing, listening, muttering.

Step 11: Listen to the song end. Listen to the DJ say “you are caller 25!”. Realize that it isn’t you he’s talking to, it is some lady named Linda from Arvada who isn’t a huge fan but thought she would give it a shot, just to see if she could get through.

Step 12: Snap off the radio. Resolve to try again tomorrow.

Step 13: It is “tomorrow”. Drive the kids to school with the radio on the same station. After dropping off the kids drive to the post office to mail money away to some big corporation. You don’t need that money anyway because you would just spend it on concert tickets. Suddenly you realize that “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” just started. Where’s the purse? Where’s the purse? You open your purse only to remember that your cell phone is currently being charged. At home.

Step 14: Admit you are not going to see U2 next week.

I have an announcement to make: I am not going to see U2 next week.