Double DS Lites
Originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

We planned. We saved. We purchased.

And it took some doing. Our local Circuit City was fresh out of the little gems. So was Best Buy. We were resigned to making our acquisition through Amazon when Nikki had the brilliant idea of checking availability elsewhere.

Our store didn’t have them, but the City in Gwinnett had at least one in stock. Maybe two. So I called and asked. Guy on the phone said they had exactly two left, but he couldn’t hold them. If we wanted them, we’d have to buy them online and arrange for in-store pickup.

Easy. Mostly.

If you’ve never visited the Circuit City “at Gwinnett Mall,” you might think that said Circuit City would be somewhere close to Gwinnett Place Mall. You’d think this, and you’d be wrong. And while one might imagine that knowing the name of the street (Venture) would be helpful in finding this location, I must tell you that you would again be mistaken. Because the Circuit City in Gwinnett is not near the Mall. It is not on Venture Parkway, but on Venture Drive. And the reason why this Circuit City is relatively flush with DS Lites is because it is surrounded by absolutely nothing in particular.

So we walk in, happy to have found finally these hard-to-find items in this hard-to-find store. At the counter is a little boy in a tank top. Standing next to him is his father. The little boy is looking at the father. The father is looking at the girl behind the counter. The girl behind the counter is on the phone. She acknowledges us, we tell her why we are there and she tells whoever is listening on the phone that there are two more people here looking for Nintendos on reserve.

Hmm. Two DS Lites in the store. One little boy. Two of us.

But you see, our DS Lites were already paid for. In no time, we signed two pieces of paper and walked right out with our brand new toys. Meanwhile, little boy and father were still standing there. Waiting.

On the way to the car, Nikki turned to me and said, “You felt bad, didn’t you?”

“About the boy?”

“Yeah.”

I’m almost positive I smirked at that point, because I replied, “Sort of … but more than that, I felt like we might not be getting our DS Lites. But through the use of technology and the Interweb, we did … which should simply serve as a lesson to Little Billy. Age and treachery, my dear. Age and treachery.”

I was kidding. Of course.