It's a battle against the odds.

I click "reserve" to book a train ticket back home for the Spring Festival and a ticketing system that cost hundreds of millions of yuan to build, crashes.

The official web speed slows to "turtle." The browser fails to load the website. Again and again. F5. F5. F5…

Wait! Finally it loads. All the tickets have gone, in under a minute.

Don't talk to me about plugins, OK?

I'm a writer, not a tech whiz.

Many of the ordinary ticket-buying public out there also lost the game in fewer than 60 seconds. They are not likely to be IT specialists.

This loophole-laden system isn't a level playing field.

Suddenly I knew what to do. I could get home without smashing my metaphorical head against the metaphorical wall and incurring metaphorical ticket-related scars. I would spend an extra 200 yuan on a high-speed train ticket to a major city and get off halfway.

My hometown happens to be halfway down a major train line to a major city where all the migrant workers tend to congregate.

Even using the widely denounced online booking website, 12306.cn, I can book a ticket to the major city without the slightest effort.

Nowadays, we Chinese have evolved increasingly complex feelings toward this travel period. The nostalgic question is no longer whether one can arrive home before Spring Festival: There's always a way. China's rapidly growing high-speed railway, airline and road transport network have created that modern miracle.

Today, the issue that you will hear us talking about time and time again is the unfairness affiliated to and reflected in the world's biggest annual human migration.

Some sit in a first-class seat on a bullet train whizzing home on a ticket they bought off a scalper. Others purchase an online ticket through a plugin that exploits 12306.cn loopholes. The real fools like myself pay over-the-odds to secure such a ticket. Meanwhile the masses, mostly those hard-working rural migrant workers from the cities, stuff themselves and their luggage into smelly carriages.

Some hype the ticket-buying class divide, between rich and poor, between nerd and newbie. Scalpers using state-of-the art advanced plugins can reportedly snatch nearly 1,000 tickets online in a few minutes and that makes ordinary people really, really mad.

"To use plugins to buy online tickets is no different from strong young men elbowing elderly ladies aside for free food," commented one Net user.

People who possess the patience necessary to purchase an ordinary ticket in an ordinary line become particularly valuable.

Despite their children appearing seriously ill and in need of a hospital visit, three pairs of parents reportedly insisted on staying on their Spring Festival train home with a simple but excruciating excuse: "It's hard to buy tickets!"

Something's not quite right when a train ticket is worth more than a child's life.

More than 200 million people are about to embark on their own Spring Festival travel adventures, bright or bitter. We have all witnessed Chinese transport develop and progress as well as experienced many new problems.

Yet there are ways to improve the current situation and fix these problems: optimize ticket distribution among different stations, improve online ticket channels and crack down on scalping, to name but three.

I dream of the day when Spring Festival travel no longer hits a raw nerve among hundreds of millions of ordinary Chinese folk just trying to get home.

I yearn to open a newspaper at this time of year and not read yet another headline about the unfair, unjust or corrupt practices that make traveling home such an embittering experience.

I do not think it is impossible for that day to come.