My Two Percent

Well…last week I did something I never thought I would do.  I waited in line…for seven hours…for a phone.  Yes, Kevin convinced me that we HAD to have the new iPhone 3G.  He had patiently waited a full year for it’s arrival (the first generation iPhone was too slow for his liking). 

At first Kevin tried to convince me that we needed to leave the house at 7:00a.m.  I laughed and informed him that if we left at 7:00…we would be at the AT & T store on 96th Street at 7:10 and that was ridiculous.  Turns out I was wrong.  We left the house promptly at 7:30…drove by the AT & T store on 96th Street and gasped as we saw a line of roughly 30-40 people.  And did I mention the phones didn’t even go on sale till 8:00?  

We decided to try another store.  We drove to the AT & T store on 86th Street, kind of in between Castleton and Keystone, and although there was a long line there as well we decided it was a bit shorter.  So we staked out our spot in line. 

We proceeded to make calls to our current cellular carriers to get all the necessary information that AT & T was telling us they needed.  Suddenly rumors started to fly that this store only had 40 phones, and only a handful were black 16G, which is what we wanted and we presumed what most others wanted.  Then we learned if you got to the front of the line and they only had, say, a white phone, or an 8G phone, then you put your name on a list and had to wait a week or two for another shipment to arrive.  Well that just wasn’t gonna work for us.  Then a woman in line announced to us all that the Apple store (just down the road - the only Apple store in all of Indiana I learned later) had at least a hundred people in line but also had plenty of phones to meet the demand.  This could have very well been a ploy to get people out of her line, but we took the bait.   

So we drove down the street to the Apple store in the Keystone Mall.  Inside we see at LEAST 100 - possibly closer to 200 people standing in weaving lines….like the lines you see at Cedar Point or Kings Island.  At first we thought it was ridiculous but shortly after an Apple store employee was there to assure ALL of us that if you didn’t mind the wait that there were plenty of phones to go around. 

So an hour went by.  The another hour.  Then another.  Thankfully the Cheese Shop next to the Apple store was giving out free coffee and also had bakery items to buy.  And the Apple store was giving out an endless supply of bottled water.  Soon lunchtime came, and people would sort of takes turns holding each other’s places in line while they went and got food for themselves and their friends.  People talked, and laughed, and got to know each other.  Plenty of people had computers and gadgets to play with, and there was plenty of “geeky tech” talk.  Then an Apple employee came out to address the crowd.  He proceeded to tell us the servers were down and it could be 4-5 hours before they would be back up and running again (which meant they couldn’t sell a single phone until the problem was fixed).  And then the unimaginable happened.  NOT A SINGLE PERSON MOVED.  Ok, a few people did leave but 90% stayed put.  I think by that point everyone had invested too much time (at least 4 hours by that time) to give up now. 

So…within a few hours (not the 4-5 that they had speculated) it was finally our turn to get into the store and start shopping.  Inside the store was what I imagine to be a smaller scale of the New York Stock Exchange.  Just loud, mass chaos.   Although we weren’t able to fully activate our phones, we did get the ones we wanted and were able to activate them through iTunes the minute we got home.  As we pulled out of the mall parking lot the clock said 3:02 p.m.  If someone would have told me when I woke up at 7:00 this morning that I would be standing in a line for 7 hours I would have quickly rolled over and gone back to sleep.  However now that it’s all said and done, I LOVE my new phone and it was definitely worth the wait! 

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