My nominal office (when I’m not gallivanting around abroad) is at half a stone throw distance from an airport. Which contains, despite some people’s notion about the backwardness of Switzerland, a bunch of shops. One of which, amazingly enough, happens to be an electronics shop.
When BC got released, I went to said electronics shop during my lunch break, and picked up my copy – at that time, a good dozen remained on the shelf.
Fast-forward to today. The shop opens at 8:30 in the morning. I’m flying back from my last trip, landing at 9:00. I’m at the shop at 9:15. Given that at noon last time, there was a good dozen copies of the first expansion to be bought, I was sure to find Wrath there at 9:15, wasn’t I?
Wrong. Despite several of my own work colleagues who I identified as WoW players the past couple of years quitting the game, the shop had already sold out all its copies. Most had been pre-reserved, something I hadn’t even considered necessary.
Bugger.
Plan B: go to work, then start making the rounds of the supermarkets during lunch break. I had already planned a trip which would take me through 5 different stores within 90 minutes if needed, some of these remote enough that people would have to drive there instead of just casually strolling around the corner (to my esteemed American readers, in tiny Switzerland, although we own 2 cars, 3 houses and 4 bank account per individual, we usually don’t get into one of these cars every time we have to go to the loo 
). That round-trip was certainly immensely more attractive than plan C – downloading the whole thing on my DSL line.
So lunch arrived while my apprehension about ending up burning fuel for nothing (don’t know about you but here, Big Oil is a lot less keen on lowering the price at the pump when the Barrel price drops than they were eager to yank it up NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW when the prices were rising) and getting stuck with said plan C was growing by the minute.
Fortunately, I needn’t have worried, the first store had a good hundred copies and no lines at the cashier’s desk. I also snatched a copy of Pink‘s latest record, Fun House, at a 20% special launch discount price (I wish I could actually see Steptoe cringing while he’s reading more evidence about my hopeless lack of musical taste. Hey buddy, she’s got one of the most amazing voices in commercial pop-rock these days, at least to me, so bugger off). I’m a sucker.
Now I only have to finish slaving through the day writing a trainer’s guide for a new training programme, and it’s either off to Northrend or to Ebon Hold (depending on what area hasn’t crashed, but if BC is any indication, chances are both areas are actually on the same instance server nodes – the smart thing would be to have Ebon Hold implemented on the Azeroth server instead, bound to see less load after this coming weekend than Northrend. Sorry, my inner geek is showing). Oh, and a small personal project may be finished today too, but more on that whenever it’s actually finished.
Anyway, have fun with the new expansion. I’ll be there shortly.
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I actually rolled my eyes or sighed or something along those lines the other day when I read this before I read “I wish I could actually see Steptoe cringing while he’s reading more evidence about my hopeless lack of musical taste”. Was quite good when I read it then