A father’s love,
a gadget junkie’s lust

Well… I didn’t have to wait too long after yesterday’s post for gratification. I couldn’t help myself. There were two irresistibly strong urges pulling me — one was a father’s love for his daughter and deep desire to bring them joy; the other was a gadget junkie’s lust for the next cool thing. Typically, I can resist one or the other on their own; but both forces acting upon me at the same time is hard to resist for very long. The more difficult of the two for me to resist would have to be wanting to make my daughters happy.

You see, if you haven’t been following along, my daughters are getting their very own iPhones, albeit the hand-me-downs from Karla and me. They were beyond excitement when I made the announcement a few weeks back. They were just as excited about the iPhone 3G launch date as Karla and I were because they knew it meant they were going to finally get iPhones, which they’ve been envying ever since I got my first one over a year ago. As a father, I truly love to give my daughters surprises and gifts and generally bring joy into their lives. It was that love for them that compelled me to do something I hate (hate, hate, hate) to do — wait in long lines.

Yesterday after lunch, we headed to Penn Square Mall to buy Sarah new prescription eyeglasses. After we were done there, we decided to see what the line was like at the Apple Store. It was long… again… but not nearly as bad as on Friday. We heard some people walking by say that it was taking about two hours to get through the line. I wasn’t excited about waiting in line for that long. But I looked at the pleading eyes of my two daughters and felt the prodding of my inside, gadget-junkie voice and relented. (Plus it meant I wouldn’t have to brave that insane Penn Square Mall parking lot again for a while!)

We joined the queue and begin our wait. The girls’ excitement made the wait much more tolerable. While we waited, Apple Store employees passed out bottled water as well as some candy treats, which was a pleasant surprise and quite nice. The line moved pretty quickly for a time and then seemingly stalled for a period of time. The closer we got, the slower the line seemed to move, until all of a sudden it seemed to move pretty quickly again.

One hour and 35 minutes after getting into line, we were entering the Apple Store. The employees were very nice and attentive. (One of the employees helping us turned out to be one of Ashley’s teachers next year! He teaches the Yearbook class that Ashley was so excited to get into for this coming year.) The process was fairly painless and 20 minutes later we were out with two new iPhone 3G’s. Phew! Finally!

We returned home and began the process of getting the two new iPhones set up, erasing our old iPhones and then getting them set up for the girls. By bedtime several hours later, everyone had working iPhones. And to see the joy on their faces made every second standing in line and every penny spent well worth it to me.

I’m sure you’ll be hearing more about our new iPhones in the coming days, but I have to cut this post off here so that I can get ready to go to my new office to get it set up so I can hit the ground running tomorrow morning. Busy, busy, busy!