On Wednesday of last week, Bobby got an offer of $300 to hold a place in the iPhone line at an Apple store from 11pm on Thursday night until 6pm on Friday. When I heard about this offer and how much it would pay, I recommended that he take it without hesitation; after all, being unemployed only pays so well. I even volunteered to drop him off at the Apple store on Thursday so he wouldn’t have to worry about paying to park his car.
When we arrived at the store at 11pm, however, there was not a single other person in line. This particular store was located in downtown Bethesda, on a busy street surrounded by high-rise offices and posh restaurants, and I felt terrible about kicking Bobby out of the car to wait alone in front of the Apple store. Instead of leaving, I parked and offered to wait in the car for a while, as long as I could get some sleep in the meantime.
Two hours later, I awoke to find that the line was still a party of one, and that Bobby had acquired a soda and an apple to help him stay awake. The car was humid and sticky, and sleeping in a ball on the front seat had left me more than a little irritable, so when he started crunching into the apple at 1:30am, I became annoyed. Enraged, actually. Because seriously, he sounded like he was eating the apple with a bulldozer. Each bite sounded like he was gnawing on granite chunks, and the sound sliced through my sleeping brain and made me want to kill him. I guess my rage was apparent, because after one quick glare from me, he took one last bite and chucked the apple out the window.
Things did not improve from there. I crawled into the backseat to try sleeping more comfortably, but was unable to get back to sleep. All that kept going through my mind was that I was getting NOTHING out of being at the Apple store in the middle of the night, and I wanted to push Bobby out of the car, run him over a few times, and then prop him up in front of the store and leave. After an hour of tossing, turning, and sighing heavily, I realized that sleep was impossible and I resorted to staring off into space. At that point, Bobby made the mistake of asking if I wanted to maybe hang out and talk, to which I replied that I’d LOVE to, and then maybe when we were done, I could also stick my finger in a power outlet or bash my head with the car door a few times.
You’re probably wondering why I didn’t just leave him and go home, as the original plan had dictated, and believe me, I asked myself that same question a few thousand times. I couldn’t though; it was the middle of the night and I was worried about leaving him alone on a city street where rats ran by periodically and the only other pedestrians were the shady, weird people that roam the streets at night. So I stayed and allowed him to wait in the comfort of the car while I mentally thought of different ways to dismember him. At around 3am, we invented a fun game called I’ll Make A Shape Out Of A Bendable Bike Rack Tie And You Guess What It Is. We made a bracelet, a snake, a telephone, a snail, headphones, a staple, and many more exciting objects. Then I made a noose and hung myself.
That game stayed fun for about fifteen seconds, and then we lapsed into a dazed, sticky silence which lasted for an eternity. At four o’clock in the morning, when one other person had appeared and was also waiting outside the store in their car, I finally decided that I absolutely could not wait any longer, and I left. Then Bobby was abducted and we haven’t seen him since.
In actuality, Bobby was invited to stay in the other guy’s car, where he slept on the backseat for a short time before resuming his wait outside. I say slept, but it was probably an uneasy doze at best, considering that the first words out of the other guy’s mouth were that he’d just gotten out of the federal penitentiary last September for smuggling cocaine. Who tells people stuff like that? I wouldn’t introduce myself to a complete stranger and then mention immediately that I’d been arrested for beating my wife, or announce that I was battling a particularly angry yeast infection. Bobby handled this information as best he could, by snuggling into this person’s backseat and figuring it could be worse. After all, he could still have been in the car with me.
This story goes on for another fourteen hours, but I’ll sum it up quickly for your reading convenience: Bobby waited in line. The end.
Because the sale of the iPhone was almost as important in the news as the incarceration of Paris Hilton and the genocide in Darfur (in that order), Bobby was interviewed and photographed by several publications and news channels during his tenure in line. Below is one of the pictures of the Apple store immediately before the phones went on sale. And there’s unwashed, tired, grumpy Bobby, standing in the blue shirt in the first spot in line. Not pictured is irritable, exhausted, unappreciated Lindsay, who was slaving away at her desk after a long day at work and a long night in the car. Not that I’m bitter or anything.