Got it

At 7.30am this morning I embarrassingly admit I was one of those sad wotsits sitting outside an O2 store. Eagerly awaiting the doors to open at 8am so that I could get my hands on some Apple goodness – the iPhone 3G.

Apparently the first guy in the queue got there at 4.30am!

When a group of school kids walked past us on their way to school, hurling abuse at the queue, I tried hiding behind a rather broad Afrikaans gentleman in front of me. I then overheard the fellow expat tell his queueing partner how he had camped the night outside a computer store in Dubai to get his hands on Windows 95 back in the day.

I really was starting to feel a little awkward.

To top things off an elderly English gentleman, with his walking stick, approached the guy behind me to ask him what all the commotion was about. When it was revealed that we were queuing to get hold of a fancy phone he looked at us like we were barking mad. “Not many ladies in this queue are there?” he said and then stumbled off.

There was a lot of queue counting by the O2 staff as they tried to figure out who would be getting a phone and who wouldn’t. It seemed I was safe, but most probably not getting a 16GB iPhone. We waited and waited as people got more and more frustrated with the excuses of the slow payment system under severe load stress causing all upgrades and purchases to happen manually.

Eventually I was through the doors and greeted by a rather stressed sales person. “You are very lucky, you’re the very last person eligible for a 16GB iPhone 3G”.

Needless to say after 3 hours of queueing I didn’t take much persuading. I got it 🙂