The Lazy Blogger

Getting the 3GS on the first day

2009-6-20

By Sumit

After a long wait, the day was finally here. I got up at 5:30 am and got ready to leave for the Valley Fair Apple Store in San Jose from my apartment in Milpitas. Managed to get ready only by 6:30. Got the 6:45 light rail from Great Mall and reached Civic Center at 7:12. Got the number 61 VTA at 7:22 and reached Stevens Creek and South Bascom at 7:45, walked the rest of the way to valley fair mall and 'queued' up at about 8:04 am. There were about 50-60 people ahead of me. The gentleman offering coffee said the line wasn't much bigger that what it was then (maybe another 20 people) before the store opened. In about 10 minutes one excited guy came shooting video of the queue in his new iPhone. Everyone were in good mood and smiled back... Some guy from the "Mercury News" (didn't see any ids on him, but heck he did quote me here and my company's CEO of all people found out from the article) was talking to people in queue and asking about their experience. Asked me a few questions like where I was from, when did I queue up, why queue up etc. Sometime later the 'conceirge' came along and verified if I had a reservation. Wasn't really sure so showed them the printout of the email and confirmed that indeed I had one. Was told to mention this when the queue reached the store (which had about 15 people ahead of me). Thereon it happened pretty fast and in no time I was at the Store (at, not IN the store). The queue of people who had preordered had 5 people and the queue without reservation had... a huge crowd of 1 person ONLY :-). That made three of us at the head of the 'reserved' queue joke that we 'now' did not have any reservations :). Anyway it wasn't a long wait, another 5 minutes and I was in and Fun started.

The first thing I wanted to confirm was if I could switch from white (which I had reserved hurridly) to black 32G which my concierge agreed to without fuss. But then when I told him I had been asked to pay an extra $200 deposit by ATT and if he could split the phone purchase and the ATT deposit into two separate credit card transactions he said no. I said okay, I was ready to swipe my credit card from India (which has about 3 times the credit limit than the one issued in US). However thereafter we hit glitch after glitch, it seems that I was not providing the same ZIP as the one I provided while booking. I really couldn't recall which one i had provided and after trying all the possible ZIP codes, the concierge gave up and requested me to re-enter the information at the site again. I was guided to a macbook Pro. Gee I felt stupid for a minute when I couldn't find the 'left click' button on the trackpad, till I realized the whole pad was 'clickable'. That out of the way I carefully provided my information and was done in about 3-4 minutes. Less than a minute later another conceirge was assigned to help me and when I repeated my request to split the payments he readily agreed because he said they were two different transactions. GREAT! Someone who knew what was going on (when i gave the required details he asked did you enter your info twice? In less than 5 minutes the transactions were done. I was asked if I wanted a printout or email would be good enough, I happily agreed to an email and he 'wrote' it down into his hand held device (impressive) and then I was taken to an 'activation table' where another concierge activated the phone. She told me the phone would be active in 5-10 minutes. I went back to look for a good protective cover for my precious posession and ended up spending another $43 for a holster+case+protective film and walked out of the Store at about 9:40 am. On my way back I still had the phone showin 'No Service'. That's when I relalized that a good ol' re-boot might just do the trick. So as I walked back to the bus stop my iPhone came alive. Since then I have fiddled around with it and so far I am still soaking it in. I started this blog on my laptop but it ran out of juice and I am not carrying my charger so guess what? Well no points for guessing, I have downloaded the wordpress blog app from the apple store and I am typing away to glory on my iphone as I wait for horizon air flight to come and fly me home! (running late by three hours) !!!!