Yesterday I had the pleasure of spending over seven hours in line to pickup my new iPhone that I had reserved in advance. I’ve never made a reservation for pickup before of an Apple product and I’m sure as hell not doing that again.
But I have to say, we were surrounded by the nicest group of people and our little group in line finally made it to the finish line, in style.
We had Sam guy who works at Duke University doing behavioral economic research, Greg the actor and the soon to be brother-in-law of Michael the Apple employee from Chicago who had to wait in line and was getting married in two days, my wife, and Spence from IBM.
Our little pod slowly moved along, talking, laughing a lot, snoozing on our feet, trying to figure out the movie references on Spence’s shirt, learning all about being an Actor in L.A. from Greg, enjoying Toy Story on Sam’s iPad, and watching Michael try to talk his way in unsuccessfully as an Apple employee.
We had a great conversation with a mall security officer that helped pass time. We learned all about the silly things people do that get them kicked out of the mall and how the mall cops have arrest authority and can take people straight to jail. This guy looked tough as hell and could stare down a statute.
But my favorite moment of the day had to be when the salesperson from Brookstone was flying a little remote controlled helicopter (like below) in the store and let it wander out a bit into the mall and it came face-to-face with the tough as hell cop. It hovered there for a moment, he stared it down and it slowly flew back into the story, just to crash not long latter.
Guys, let’s make a pact to NEVER do that again.
And just to top off the day, after we left the Apple store we had to go to Best Buy to return something and that took 45 minutes.

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I’m amazed that anyone would be willing to invest that much time and energy into picking up this gadget. Neat as I’m sure it is, nothing is that neat! Have fun with it!
I agree, but once you are in line for X amount of time it becomes more of a tragedy to waste that investment by walking away. If I had known it would take 7.5 hours, I never would have begun that process in the first place.
Steve