I feel like I’m just waking up from an awful nightmare. Actually “waking up” might not be the right expression since I haven’t slept in 30 hours but you get my point. Let me tell you my little story.

2 years ago, when the iPhone 3G came out in Belgium, I had been waiting for an iPhone for so long that I simply couldn’t help being there on the first day. So when Mobistar launched a small marketing stunt by starting selling the iPhone at midnight, I decided to wait in line. And I did. From 4pm the day before until I received the iPhone 3G number 50 for all Belgium at 2am in the morning. The experience was painful at the end, especially because I had totally forgotten to bring a chair. But overall it was very rewarding and I was very positively surprised by the way Mobistar had organized the whole thing.

Last year, I completely missed the iPhone 3GS launch so I had a few hard weeks trying to find one.

That’s why this year, for the iPhone 4, I decided to go wait in line in the biggest Apple Store in France, in Paris, at Carrousel du Louvre. Oh my! What a disappointment! Just to sum it up so you can imagine what mood I’m in: one sleepless night, more than 300 euros in train and parking tickets, 15 hours in line including 8 hours standing, hence 2 feet hurting like hell… and not one single iPhone 4.

I was there at 9pm yesterday. Everything started nice. I was only the tenth in line. I had just bought myself one of these very comfortable and robust camping chairs. I had my iPad and some WiFi. I enjoyed it. And then things progressively but rapidly went very wrong. In front of me, there was a bunch of Russian guys who started drinking uncontrollably, and since there was simply no organization whatsoever, nothing prevented their Russian friends to join them late in the night, without any respect for the guys who had been waiting here for long hours. Then the rumor started to spread that the Carrousel galleries would open at 4am exceptionally. So when 2 security guards approached the door, no barrier, no Apple guy, nothing or no one prevented the line to turn into a big compact crowd where last come became first served. And we waited there for nothing to happen, standing, from 4am to around 6am. Eventually the security guards ended up opening the door. In fact not THE door we were all anxiously waiting in front of. No! Too easy! Another door on the side of the gallery, resulting in a chaotic and unbelievable crowd movement that finished up the last bits of line order there was.

So it was around 6am when other security guards started to appear, and those guys obviously had no clue how to handle a crowd, let alone an international one (have you ever tried to reason with a drunk Russian guy?). They just yelled at us, ordered us to move backwards and then forwards again, a couple of times, and at 7 am we had yet another differently ordered “line”, standing. But at least the security guards managed to maintain some sort of discipline by filtering who could enter the queue right in the middle for some reason. An Estonian guy behind me successively introduced his wife and his girlfriend. Of course, once they were in the line, they couldn’t care less about the dude.

And then around 7:30am, guards started disappearing again, obviously called to greater ventures down in the galleries, and chaos came back until they started letting people in, in small groups, a little before 8am. We thought “that’s great, they’re letting people in at the rate the Apple Store can process their purchases.” There were around 150 people in front of me (remember, I was 10th in line at the beginning), so I figured I might be able to execute my plan and catch my train back at 9:25am. How foolish of me!

There was another line inside the gallery! So the small groups who were let in all started running in order to win a few precious ranks (remember, I had not slept in 24 hours at that time, very practical to run like crazy!). But wait, it gets worse, there was not one line inside the gallery. There were 2!!! One for us fools who hadn’t reserved our precious little one. And one for those who reserved it online and just came to pick it up. Wait! What? Pick it up! Why aren’t those guys just waiting at home for the postman to come by and bring them the precious little one in the comfort of their home? What the heck is this pick-up thing? And soon we realized that they were letting people inside the Apple Store in a proportion of 8-9  reservations for 1-2 people without reservation. Wait! What?! What the hell is the rationale about that? At most, reservation is supposed to guarantee that you will have one, not that you will have one before everyone else!

But wait, it gets funny too. Remember those proportions? I said nothing about the rate. According to our estimation, it took somewhere around 15 to 30 f***ing minutes for a blue-shirt-guy to process one customer. 30 minutes! So guess what happened? The line of reservations grew longer and longer with fake reservations, the line of non-reservations turned into yet another big chaotic pack, security guards kept yelling at us, ordering us to move backwards. Yes, backwards! All of that while the Apple store seemed to be able to process somewhere around 20 persons per hour. So the pack I was in moved 10 meters in 4 hours, I kept seeing people without reservations suddenly changing lines magically and getting out with 4 iphones at once. And yes, at 12pm, I gave up!

I decided my body had taken enough stress. I stepped back and realized that an iPhone was not worth that! Especially not a black one anyway! So I just left the queue, went back to the train station, bought another train ticket at an indecent price hoping that I would get back home as soon as possible to spit out this bad nightmare and forget everything about it.

And here we are. It’s 4pm. I don’t have any iPhone 4, I’m frustrated and I’m pissed. I’m so pissed at Apple right now. If someone from Apple is reading this, read it carefully! Not only am I a basic fanboy of yours, but I’m also an iPhone/iPad developer and my 2 modest apps on the App Store participate in the great ecosystem that allows you to sell all those magical devices. And even without all of that, I really expected from you a buying experience at least equal to the one I had with the little Mobistar 2 years ago. And in the end, no organization whatsoever, no one from Apple to handle the logistics in the queue late in the afternoon, no one to give clear and consistent instructions to those security guards, no communication about why things were so slow. And slow they were! And chaotic too. Several people fainted in the line, a lot of people cheated, everyone was pissed off to a point you can’t even imagine. Now let me tell you this and read my lips: if that’s the only possible outcome of your corporate ego going through the roof, if all you can do is treat your most loyal customers like this (check my recent purchase record), then I SUDDENLY FEEL LIKE BUYING AN ANDROID PHONE (and developing for it!). But you don’t care, right? Because so many people are buying it anyway…

I’m exhausted. I’m starving. I’m frustrated. And all I can do right now is spit it out on my blog and laugh at myself for being such an overly optimistic fanboy consumerist. And all I want to do is forget about this day. Apple, you just created the new worst day of my life so far as I can remember. And I don’t thank you for that.