Well, the day has come and gone. I woke up around 6:30am on Friday, July 11th, 2008 for two reasons. The first and foremost reason, Heather. I'll talk about this more later. The second reason was that this particular Friday was deemed iDay 2.0.

Why? It was the official launch day of the iPhone 3G, a better, faster way to do random stuff on a cell phone. Since Blake thought my previous phone tasted like candy, I had to replace it. What better way than to purchase the most bleeding-edge tech product on the market?

So, after dropping my wife off at her test location, I quickly made my way toward the local AT&T store. As I arrived, I saw the line outside the store. I checked my clock. 7:24am and already a line of over 100 people.

I quickly made my way to a parking spot not far from the end of the line. I shut off the engine, grabbed my wallet and headed to the back of the line.

There were two guys behind me, both were pretty cool and helped pass the time. As 8 o'clock arrived, a store manager came out and asked if we were all ready and wanted us to scream YAA! or some crap. We all just kind of muttered under our breath.

Jumping forward to about 8:30am. We have still not seen a single person leave the building. Hmm. I wonder what the hold up is?
No sooner did I ask this when the first person exited the store, followed by a store representative. She told everyone to listen up. "iTunes activation sucks worse this year than it did last year." Ok, so maybe I made that part up. The following is more accurate.

"The iTunes servers are basically frozen solid with the millions of people trying to unbrick their phones. We have spent the past 35 minutes doing just two phones. We are asking you to all take your phones home, plug them in, and unbrick them youselves. This will make this process go much smoother."

The line finally started to be whittled down. When they were down to about 15-20 people in front of me, they started counting us and comparing it to the number of iPhone's they had left. Oh crap.

They said they had 11 8GB, 3 16GB black, 3 16GB white. I really wanted the simple 8GB model. It would save me $100. Why not?

So as they start going down the line asking who wants what, it came down to me. Luckily, I got the very last 8GB they had available. The 2 guys behind me also got 16GB versions and everyone else was screwed. YES! I am basically guaranteed to leave with iPhone in hand!

Almost exactly one and a half hours after I walked to the back of the line, I was in the store, where I saw an old friend from church. Unfortunetly, he was rather busy with customers so I didn't get to say much to him.

I set up my plan, got the phone and all the other goodies, and made my way back into the sunlight. When I turned around, I was suprised to see a very long line of at least 50 people loyally waiting in line to reserve a phone on the next shipment.

I picked my wife up and headed home. I soon discovered the issues that the manager was referring to. It took an additional hour or so before I finally snuck through the cyber-crowds and brought the phone to life.

As I was exploring the device for the very first time, all that crossed my mind was one sentence: "This was sooo worth it."

The Line


There are no pictures associated with this post.