Denied!!

We had a Nintendo Wii today...sort of...for about 3 hours. What a disappointing, waste of a day.

We've been wanting a Wii for awhile. Actually, I wanted to get Dianne one for her birthday. But with all the supply problems they've had, I couldn't find one. A few weeks ago, a co-worker told me he scouted the Sunday paper inserts and went to the store early and got one. One of Dianne's co-workers also mentioned local Wii sightings.

I decided today was the day to go for it. I got up about 6:20 and went to Krogers to buy the Cincinnati Enquirer. It's easy to get a prime parking space at that time of day! I went home, scoured the inserts, and found that Circuit City mentioned Wiis. The ad said they were handing out vouchers at 9 -- one hour before they open. I had some toast and hit the road.

When I got to Circuit City a little before 8, there were eight people already waiting. As you saw in my Twitter tweets, one couple had been there since 5 AM! At 9 AM the manager came out and distributed the vouchers. I was one of the lucky 10 who got one! Several folks were denied. I waited with my book to read ('Made to Stick' by the Heath brothers) until 10 AM when the store opens. While waiting, there were a bunch of folks that drove up looking for a voucher. They were out of luck.

At 10 I went in and bought the Wii, an extra controller, and a Zelda game for Dianne. I thought life was good. I even stopped at Marx's Bagels on the way home to get brunch for us.

Dianne opened it up and we spent quite a bit of time fishing cords through our wall unit to connect up the Wii to the TV. We turn it on and...NOTHING. We check everything...still nothing. I even brought the TV down from the bedroom to try the connection there...still nothing. Were we doing something silly or did we get a bad unit?

So we had to pull the cords back out of the wall unit. We packed up the Wii and made a return trip to Circuit City. The customer service person was nice enough, but he kinda had a look of "...no signal...yeah, sure." He connected it up to one of the showroom TVs and got the same result -- a black screen. At least we weren't doing something stupid, but how disappointing to get a bum unit. They took it back and will hold one for us when they get their next shipment (whenever that is).