We PR people have a natural tendency to try to put the best possible face on things. While this is a good skill for any PR pro to master, it can be carried too far. Ultimately, as one of my colleagues likes to say, you can't polish a turd.

But that doesn't always stop people from whipping out the turd rag and giving it a try. Those who have been paying attention will have caught the news of the collapse of BOCOG's ticket sales website a couple of days ago, during the launch of the second phase of Olympic ticket sales. One of my favorite foreign correspondents kindly pointed Imagethief at something he had not noticed, which was BOCOG's first press release following the collapse.

The actual story was that sales went live at 9AM Tuesday. In a frantic online rush, the server was whacked with 200,000 submissions per minute and 8 million page views in the first hour (with more submissions than page views as people presumably clicked repeatedly to submit). Needless to say the site went down faster than a sailor's shorts in Subic.

You know the story, I know the story. A pinheaded monkey knows the story. BOCOG doesn't know the story:

9,000 tickets sold after launch of second phase sale
Updated：2007-10-30

(BEIJING, October 29) -- At 9:00 a.m., on Tuesday, the second phase of the ticket sale for the Beijing Olympic Games was launched. As of 11 a.m., a total of 9,000 tickets had been sold through various channels, with the official ticketing website and the outlets of the Bank of China contributing to 98 percent of the sales.

The public has shown great interest from what was seen this morning. Some customers arrived at the Bank of China outlets very early to wait in line; the official website's page view volume reached eight million in the first hour of sales, and an average of 200,000 submissions per minute were recorded online. The ticketing hotline received over two million calls between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m.

Because of the excessive page view volume, the data processing capacity of the website's ticket distribution system has been affected, causing relatively slow speeds in the sale of tickets through the various distribution channels and causing the online registration system to be unavailable temporarily. The BOCOG Ticketing Center is taking measures to enhance the system's processing capacity and to improve the operational conditions. Under the circumstances, ticket buyers purchasing tickets through the Bank of China outlets or the call center may need to try again later.

The BOCOG Ticketing Center advises ticket buyers to be patient and reminds online buyers to refrain from clicking on the same page repeatedly, which might add to the present traffic jam online.

Yes, you read that correctly. "9,000 tickets sold" is the headline, announced like it's a good thing, and without specifying the breakdown in the share of sales attributable to the web and to Bank of China. That's out of 1.85 million tickets for sale mind you. So they got 0.5% of their stock out the door before the works came down. Only in the deepest of rabbit holes is that good news. The crash of the site is mentioned down in paragraph three, where it is delicately phrased as "temporary unavailability". At least they included that they are taking steps to correct the situation.

I admire the plucky attempt to put the good news up front but, really, this is like trying to get people past your dreadful leprosy by asking if they've noticed that you trimmed your nose hair.

To BOCOG's credit, the follow-up press release, issued yesterday, was somewhat more straightforward, explaining the issue and stressing BOCOG's efforts to correct it. It does, however, win an Imagethief Award for the year's most utterly useless photo caption. I won't spoil it for you. Go check it out. You'll be glad you did.

Meanwhile, I'd like to suggest that if BOCOG wants to bury the lede again it find a better way of misdirecting people's attention. For instance, were I to rewrite the press release above, I might try the following:

9,000 tickets sold after launch of second phase sale
Updated：2007-10-30

(BEIJING, October 29) -- At 9:00 a.m., on Tuesday, the second phase of the ticket sale for the Beijing Olympic Games was launched. As of 11 a.m., a total of 9,000 tickets had been sold through various channels, with the official ticketing website and the outlets of the Bank of China contributing to 98 percent of the sales.

The public has shown great interest from what was seen this morning. Some customers arrived at the Bank of China outlets very early to...hey, what's that rustling noise? Oh my god it's...it's...thousands of man-eating cockroaches! OH GHOD, THEY'RE EVERYWHERE! AAAAH! AAAAH! GET THEM OFF! FOR GOD'S SAKE GET THEM OFF! AAAAAARRRRGGHH!

Also, the website crashed.

See? That wasn't so hard.

Updated: To add the line on the total number of tickets available for sale and percentage sold. Hat tip: China Economic Review.