View From the Bushes

We're starting our World of Warcraft "campaign" tonight and being a person short, we decided to invite my brother-in-law, but of course this meant he needed a copy of the game. So yesterday I went on another massive hunt for a copy. I find that when I decide I want something I get pretty tenacious about finding it. (This might be the place to note that when I saw they might still have some copies in Rock Springs, Wyoming, 190 miles away I didn't immediatly rule out driving there.)

Right off the bat the first thing I hear is that Blizzard isn't releasing any new copies of the game until they can get the server populations under control. And there are various reports saying that if you haven't already gotten a copy you may be out of luck. Copies are going for $90 on Ebay, Amazon is back ordered, and so is Gamestop.com. I start calling local retailers and they just laugh at me, but I have to buy a gamer headset anyway, so I decide to take to the streets during lunch. Now instead of laughing at me over the phone they're laughing at me to my face. One retailer says he got a shipment in a week ago Tuesday and it was gone within 8 hours.

Having struck out locally, I decided to see what I could find online. This was, of course, infintely less preferable because we were playing the next day, but it looked like Circuit City had some copies, but I still had to figure out some way to get the game in one day and my brother-in-law was still scouring the northern half of the state. Eventually we gave up and so I decided to just order it from Circuit City. I was to step three of the order process before they too revealed they were out of stock. After another hour or so of searching I found out that it was still available through ebgames. I should have checked there first, but I couldn't quite remember the URL and I figured that since it was one of the big boys, it would have to be sold out.

Of course this still left me with the problem of what to do while it shipped. Fortunately, I bumped into a friend I hadn't talked to in three months, and he just happened to have purchased the collector's edition of the game which came with a 10 day trial, so I managed to talk him out of that and as a result I saved the day... Okay, maybe the whole point is I wasted a bunch of time, but you have to admit that I displayed an impressive amount of tenacity.

Carpe Diem Quam Minimum Credula Postero
Ross