Continued...

"So you have absolutely none?"

"None. We have no Wiis or PS3s."

WHAT?!?!?! Are you kidding me?

But it was true. They had nothing in stock. Cue collective astonishment.

Aside #1: Bear in mind that she could have told us this information several minutes earlier, because it was blatantly obvious what we were we had lined up to get. Instead, she chose to make us watch her get a Starbucks, unlock the door, turn on everything in the store, and take her sweet time doing it. All the while she knew that she had no consoles. That’s TERRIBLE customer service, folks, and EB Games/GameStop will never get another dime of my considerable gaming budget because of it. Their entire chain is dead to me. There are plenty of places where I can buy games without having to deal with rude, inconsiderate, and unfriendly employees.

Anyways, back to the story. The GameStop debacle had left the entire camper group in a sour mood to say the least. A few of them sarcastically thanked her for her friendliness and filed out, and soon I was the only one left. I figure that since I woke up at 4am and waited an hour-and-a-half in the cold that I might as well get something, so I put my $100 store credit towards Zelda and Excite Truck. I asked her if she had any controllers and she said no, but then thought about it and said, "Oh, I think we have a remote." So I got a Wiimote as well.

At this point, I wasn't really pissed off as much as I was bummed out. I only became pissed off after stopping at two other GameStops that I had dismissed as lost causes, only to find that one of them had six Wiis in stock that morning and the other had "a couple". The one with six in stock was literally a mile and a half from my house! Of course, all of the Wiis were gone as soon as the stores opened. Apparently I picked the only EB Games in the city that had absolutely nothing, and a rude employee to boot. Unbelievable.

Aside #2: As another aside, the next day I took my copy of Zelda out of the bag and realized that it wasn’t shrink-wrapped. I opened it, and there was NO GAME IN THE BOX!! All of that trouble, and they had the nerve to sell me a display copy that didn’t even have a disk in it! When I went back to the store to exchange it, the same unfriendly clerk took the disk out of an envelope, put it in the box and handed the game back to me. I told her that I wanted a sealed copy (since I was paying full price for it), and she said that she didn’t have any more. I told her in that case I wanted a refund, so she refunded the amount on a gift card. But she couldn’t even get THAT simple task right. I checked the amount that she put on the gift card as I walked to my car, and sure enough it wasn’t right. She had refunded me $49.99 exactly, which didn’t account for the tax that I had paid on the game! I was dumbfounded. By now, my entire experience with GameStop had become comical. I walked back in and had her put the correct amount on the card, and left the store happy to never have to deal with them again.

I got home after visiting the two other GameStop stores at 8:15am. Now I really had nothing to lose, so I figured I'd call up every GameStop/EB Games within a 25-mile radius to see if they still had any Wiis. Most of them were empty, but one of them had one in stock. However, they were holding it for somebody (which is against store policy, but whatever). I kept on calling, and finally hit the jackpot with one about 15 miles away. The guy answered and said, "Yeah, we still have 3 or 4 in stock, and we're pretty slow today." I immediately put the store's address into Google maps and planned my route. My sister, in town for the holidays, decided to join in on the fun and come with me. Instead of writing down directions, I just grabbed my laptop with the map page still up and raced out the door.

We were near our exit when the Google maps page automatically refreshed. Of course, I had no Internet connection so the page couldn’t refresh, which screwed up the map. So much for directions. I wound up going two exits too far, wasting precious time. I doubled back, took a guess at the right exit and luckily it paid off. I rolled into the plaza parking lot at 9am on the dot. I accidentally drove by the EB Games because I didn't see it, so I wound up parking a little way down the parking lot instead of right in front of it. My sister and I get out of the car and gingerly walk towards the store. To my horror, a teenager walked out with a Wii console in an EB Games bag! If the guy said that there were only "3 or 4" in stock, then that meant that there was only 2 or 3 left, right? What was the chance that one other person happened to stroll in there while I was in the car? This wasn’t looking good.

As I walked up to the door, a woman walked in no more than ten seconds ahead of me. She walked up to the counter, and as I walked in the clerk turned and went to the back of the store. He returned holding a Wii and said to her, "You’re lucky." I said, "Please tell me that’s the second-to-last one." He shook his head and I LOST IT! I turned around and charged out of the store, screaming profanities at the top of my lungs. I walked out into the parking lot and screamed some more. Then I walked to my car and screamed some more, and threw my hat around a bit. Then my sister and I hopped into the car, and I screamed some more all the way home. Then I got home and screamed a little more, and I was done with it. I was done with killing myself to get a Wii.

A week went by. I still kept tabs on what stores would be getting in Wii shipments, and I had it on good authority that Best Buy would have a shipment the following Sunday. There was no way I was going to camp out, but I figured I’d get to a local store a half-hour early and take my chances. There was a large store a few miles away that I figured would have a large line, but then I stepped back and tried not to over-think the situation. I reasoned that since it was a large store they’d have large shipment, so going there would definitely be worthwhile. Sure enough, it was. The store opened at 10am, so I arrived at 9:40am. There was a line of about fifty people, and I slid in at the back just as they were handing out Wii tickets. I got ticket number 097 (although I doubt that I was the 97th person in line), waited ten more minutes until they ushered me in, and picked up a Wii and, finally, a sealed copy of Zelda. I felt kind of silly for all the trouble I went though, but I didn’t care because I finally had my Wii! The saga had come to an end, but the love affair between me and my Wii had just begun.