iPhone unavailable

That's about as close as I got to the iPhone this morning. Stood in line for about an hour but it turns out I got there about two hours too late. I got there at about 8:45 and they ran out of the 8G iPhones just a few people after the guy who got there at 7:00. The 16G iPhone reportedly went sooner than that! (Mind you, I kinda have my doubts regarding whether they ever had the 16G iPhones there in the first place; my inner conspiracy theorist suspects that the 16Gs never shipped, at least not to this, our closest dippy little store.) Seems like AT&T (and Apple) got slammed with the demand. They ran out of iPhones in about two hours and they had trouble placing "Direct Fulfillment Orders" for all us suckers who stood there as it turns out for no reason (computers were not responding of course). Well, the end result is that yes, seeking direct fulfillment, I too placed my order, meaning that AT&T took my money, but I'll have to wait about two additional weeks before getting my clammy little hands on the coveted piece of black plastic. Hopefully they make good on the two week delivery. The apologetic rep said this was the fastest route to getting the iPhone as all the AT&T outlets were quickly running out of stock (i.e., "don't bother driving around to other stores"). I suspect that this all pretty much played out as Apple wanted it to: shipping out a small quantity of devices to get a better estimate of the actual demand. Why overproduce, right? This also makes for a more exciting press release: "Whaddayaknow, iPhones sold out! `Unprecedented' demand, bla bla bla."