What Happens to a Wii Deferred?

I was going to title this entry "A Wii Bit of Trouble," but then I discovered the title's already been taken.

For the past several months now, I have been laboring under a weight which sags like a heavy load, i.e., my dissertation. But through the struggle, through the clenched fists, a dream has kept me going: after I turn in my dissertation, I told myself, I will buy a wii. You may remember that I blogged about the wii back in November. At that time, it was very difficult to obtain a Wii. In my naivete, I believed that by the time I turned my dissertation into my committee--which was yesterday, over four and a half months since I had first played the wii--I could just walk into a store, and a wii would be there! Nope.

Sadly, I am but a Wii novice, and unskilled in the art of obtaining a wii. "Aren't all people wii novices?" you might well ask. The answer is "No." A "Wii novice" is "someone who wants to buy just one wii to share with his family." A wii professional, by contrast, is"someone who wants to buy as many wiis as possible so he/she can sell them on ebay for $150 more than he/she paid for them."

What has been fascinating to me as I have lurked in the wii discussion board on amazon is the number of ebay sellers who don't feel for beating out people waiting in line for their first wii. On the discussion board, members share various tips on what store will next be selling a wii, but on how to amass as many of them as possible: for example, it is my understanding that, even though you can only buy one wii at a time from amazon.com when they sell them, as soon as you have purchased one, you can go right back and purchase another until they are sold out (which happens in 8-30 minutes). One writes, "2 computers, 2 $15000 limit credit cards, 2 accounts, here i wait." As another remarks, "Also here to sell. Seems like there are more EBAYERS than actual customers." On one thread, an ebayer remarked how, after beating out several people who wanted a wii, he told them where there was going to be another sale that day, and how good it made him feel that he saw several of them at the next store.

In reading these thread, it feels like I am entering another world. People understand themselves not to be greedy jerks but providing a helpful service--they sit patiently at their computers so that others don't have to. Given how thoroughly absorbed I am in my own perspective--that I also am sitting patiently at my computer but not getting any because "there are more EBAYERS than actual customers"--they seem like jerks.

In person, of course, many of them aren't "jerks." Some of them might be in it for the thrill of the chase--buying as many wiis in a short space of time becomes a kind of competitive 100 meter dash (a "wii sport," if you will). One dealer's bragging that he "made $1892.00 (profit) last week off 10 units" is perhaps not substantially different from bragging about one's corporate portfolio, or perhaps the size of one's thingie. And let's face it, once you've had to go to all the trouble of buying a wii for yourself--of having rss feeds sent to you from wiihunter.com and wiitracker.com any time there's a wii sale--do you really want to let all of your learning go to waste?

In reality, I pity these people. The price of progress is that, one day, "everyone will have a wii," and the services of the wii master tradesman will no longer be required. I am reminded of the words in a Flogging Molly song,

My name it is Sean Dempsey as Dublin as could be./ Born hard and late in Pimlico in a house that owned a Wii./ My trade I was a cooper, lost out to redundancy/ Like my house that fell to progress my trade's a memory."

(Okay, the real line was, "in a house that ceased to be.")