Wiiiiiiiii

Eak, almost 8 months since the last update, a new record. Sorry! But thats about how long I’ve been waiting for today. =]
Today of course was the release of the Wii from Nintendo. I decided that I needed one a few months ago and decided last week that I would wait in line at a store in order to ensure that I did receive one, so wait I did today, and eventually it paid off.
However, it wasn’t quite that easy.
Early this morning, at about 5am I arrived at the Target/Best Buy in South Setauket, NY. From what I had seen on the Internet, the targets on Long Island were supposed to have more Wii’s then any other store, and they opened earlier then anything except Walmart so I decided that it would be the best bet. When I arrived at 5am though there was already a huge line!

Some random, non-target employee was also keeping a list of everyone in line up to 100 and by his count I was about #110. Now believing the Internet source that said there were 140 shipped to this store, I thought I was in good shape. However, this ended up not being the case.

At about 7:00am some guy who identified himself as the manager showed up and told everyone that he just unwrapped all of the Wii’s and they only had 100 units! We were unsure at this point if this guy was the manager, but it did scare a few people off. I ended up waiting there until about 7:30 when the same guy handed out the tickets, and I ended up being only 5 short! It turns out that person #100 had been waiting there since 3am so I didn’t feel that bad.
After leaving Target I had heard rumors that the Toys R Us only about two miles away, which opened at 10am, had almost no line at all so thats where I headed. When I got there, about 7:35, there were only about 40 people in front of me, and they had a sign on the door saying they had 110 Wii’s!!
..
As the hours rolled on one of the the line grew both in back of me, and also a little in front :(, and by 9:45 a count of people in front of me showed I was about #60, still in very good shape. However at this point people started getting a bit upset that others were cutting and a fight was close to breaking out minutes before 10am when the manager came by and handed out tickets to the first 110 people!
Here you can see myself and a couple of the other people in line right around me just after receiving our tickets:

I was soo happy that my 5 hours of waiting in the cold (~46 degrees F) weren’t in vain!
At 10am sharp they let us into the store and everyone crowded into the electronics section of the store. There wiimotes & numchucks sold out fairly quickly, and there was a scare that Zelda was going to sell out too, but at 10:50am, five hours and fifty minutes after I lined up, I drove away with everything I wanted: The Wii (included one wiimote, one numchuck, and wii sports), a Classic Controller, Zelda, and Super Monkey Ball. Yay!