Story 1:

It’s 11:00 Saturday night, and I’ve just finished watching an episode of South Park and feeling a bit tired.  I remember all of a sudden that it’s Wii launch night, and off I go to the Fred Meyers in Ballard.  I show up and the line is long, but not crazy long, I think I have an outside shot at getting one.  After about 10 minutes an employee comes out and walks to the end of the line saying that the store only had 90 Wiis and had already given out 90 tickets to get one — if you didn’t have a ticket you may as well go home.

Lots of people heeded his advice, and all of a sudden I was at the front of the “alternate” line.  It consisted of about 20 people who were hoping for either a counting error, or something else — basically just hoping beyond hope.  I was specifically hoping that one — just one — person in the line ahead of me would suffer credit card failure.  Maybe their crazy ex-wife chose today to mess up his credit, or maybe an identity thief  would choose today to buy $2K worth of internet porn.  Stranger things have happened… except that they didn’t happen.  All 90 people got their 90 consoles and even though I was the first alternate I left with nothing.

Story 2:

For the American Turkey Weekend holiday I’m taking the lovely wife up to beautiful British Columbia to visit my folks.  On a whim I figure I’d see if I could get a Wii while I’m there.  So I call the local Future Shop and ask when they are getting in their next shipment.  To my surprise, they said “uh, we just got them in right now”.  So I did what any reasonable person would do — I called my mom and asked her to go get one for me.  Sadly, by the time she got to the store an hour later, they were already sold out again.

to be continued…