The northlondonhippy

Archive for July 8th, 2008

Back in Sep­tem­ber, I wrote a lit­tle piece on why my phone was not an iPhone, yet.

But soon, my phone will be an iPhone.

iHope.

iPray.

iDream.

iPre-registered…

…for the brand new, shiny lick­able iPhone 3G just as soon as O2 let me. Yes­ter­day, I received an email advis­ing me that I could pre-order one of these lit­tle babies online and it would be deliv­ered to my north Lon­don lair on Fri­day, which is the offi­cial launch day for this lat­est ver­sion of the world’s favourite touch­screen mobile.

Sorted!

Or so I thought.

I placed the order before 8:30am yes­ter­day, put in all my details and saw the con­for­ma­tion screen with my order num­ber. They said I would receive an email with all of these details as well.

I’m still wait­ing for that email to arrive.

In O2’s FAQs, they say you can email them your PAC code, from your pre­vi­ous net­work and they can add it to your account, so I did.

The reply I received was a bit surprising.

I need to men­tion that this reply to my email wasn’t spot­ted by me until many hours later, because I slept all day, because I was between shifts.

I still am, so there will be another snooze very soon.

While I was sleep­ing, O2’s entire online order­ing sys­tem was melt­ing down into a steam­ing pud­dle of poo.

They were over­whelmed by the num­ber orders being placed, or “vic­tims of their own suc­cess” as I am sure some O2 spokesper­son will be stat­ing in front of a TV cam­era very soon. That’s what all com­pa­nies say when they can’t keep up with demand; its an oldie but a goodie.

So any­way, I wake up and wait­ing for me is an actual reply from an actual human O2 employee, who apol­o­gised for the lack of a facil­ity to input my PAC code when I placed my order and then explained what I needed to do with it (all after I receive the iPhone 3G) AND then went on to share an extremely impor­tant fact…

“Your order (on-xxxxxxxxx) for the 16Gb (Giga­bytes) iPhone 3G is cur­rently out of stock. You’ll receive your order on or after 11 July 2008.”

The key words in that sen­tence are:
– out of stock
– on or after

Fuck.

Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.

FUCK!

You have no idea how deeply my lit­tle heart sank at this most dis­tress­ing and unpleas­ant turn of events.

I ordered my iPhone 3G less than 30 mins after they went on sale and it sounds like there’s a bet­ter than aver­age chance I will be sit­ting here all day on Fri­day, star­ing out my win­dow for a courier that will never come.

Oh the horror!

I’ve been wait­ing a seri­ously long time for my iPhone 3G, for­go­ing the orig­i­nal ver­sion which I could have had last autumn…and if I did get that one, I would be get­ting a free upgrade to the new model, just for sign­ing a new 18 month contract.

These ain’t tears of joy stain­ing my key­board, trust me.

So I wait and I won­der. Is there an iPhone 3G sit­ting in a ware­house some­where with “the northlon­don­hippy” on printed on the label!

I hope not, because there’s no way they’d know where to deliver it, but my real world name and proper address might be better.

You get the idea any­way, either I ordered early enough to have them allo­cate me one, or they have so few that they ran out in like 10–15 min­utes of online trad­ing and I’m screwed.

No one knows for cer­tain how many iPhone 3G’s are even avail­able, O2 and Apple have remained silent on this issue, at least accord­ing to the var­i­ous news­pa­per reports I read this morn­ing. The clos­est I got to any sort of detail was that one news­pa­per thought half the iPhone 3Gs were being pre-sold online and the other half were head­ing to O2 shops around the UK. How do you play the odds on that one?

So here’s my next quandary, do I can­cel my online order and gam­ble that I will have bet­ter luck at 8am on Fri­day at my local O2 shop? Will there be a queue? Will there be enough to go around? Will I get mugged on my way back home, because crim­i­nals read the news too?

I don’t have the answer to any of those ques­tions, except that last one…I would die or kill to pro­tect my brand new, shiny, lick­able iPhone 3G, so you best think twice before you attempt to pil­fer it from me!

I’ve got mixed feel­ings about O2 already and I’ve only been a (non active) cus­tomer of theirs for only 24 hours.

On the one hand, I’ve had a per­sonal reply to my emailed ques­tion, but on the other hand, they have not con­firmed my order by email, as they said they would, nor given me any sort of update on my order’s progress.

In light of the mas­sive media atten­tion this launch has seen and will likely see over the next week, you would think O2 would be pre­pared for a sit­u­a­tion like this. Hold­ing emails and press state­ments would be out there already to coun­ter­act all the neg­a­tive infor­ma­tion I’ve seen about short­ages and poor cus­tomer service.

Maybe they should hire me to do their PR.

Then again, they don’t have to do any­thing. It seems we’re all slaver­ing like rabid dogs at the prospect of own­ing the lat­est iPhone and no mat­ter how badly we’re treated, we still want one.

It’s not like we can get one else­where, thanks to O2’s exclu­sive deal with Apple, we have no real choice.

I’m no dif­fer­ent, I’m will­ing to jump through mul­ti­ple hoops of fire and swear an oath to satan if I have to, as long as I’m clutch­ing mine this Friday.

Ok, I know I’ve already sworn sev­eral oaths to satan, one more’s not going to make a blind bit of difference.

As long as I get my god­damn iPhone 3G on Fri­day, I don’t care about any­thing else!

Please oh great gods of high tech­nol­ogy, may you be smil­ing upon me, your most wor­thy and devoted disciple!

Just gimme my god­damn iPhone, goddammit!