Let me make this clear: I want an iPhone 3G as badly as any of you nerds. Last night I had a dream, and in that dream I was downloading sweet little apps from Apple’s new app store that would make my life perfect thereafter. Look, I said to myself in the dream, an app that will make matzo ball soup from scratch! An app that will pick up my dry-cleaning! An app that will make rainbows appear in the sky and bluebirds land on my shoulder and tickle my neck until my frown turns upside down!

This morning I took my daughter to her Montessori school on Arapahoe St. On the ground level of that same building is a tiny little AT&T store – a glorified kiosk, really, not much bigger than a studio apartment in Manhattan. In other words, it would be the perfect stealth location to get an iPhone without waiting in line. I was wrong. At 9:30, there were still 50 or so people waiting. I doubted a shop that size would have enough inventory to give one to everyone.

Slowing the process down, of course, is Apple’s own asinine policy stating you have to activate the phone in-store. Last year, when the iPhone 1.0 was released, you could just walk in, slap down your money, and leave. That process worked so smoothly they naturally had to change it. Already reports are trickling in from Twitter and the tech blogs that AT&T’s activation servers have crashed in several locations, leaving customers who waited in line for hours high, dry, and iPhoneless.

Part of me feels sorry for them, but another part of me – the wiseass jerk part – laughs. Nerds, I think, serves you right. My guess is everyone in line has a functioning mobile phone already, probably even an earlier version of the iPhone. But there’s always going to be an ohmyGodIneedittoday subsection of geeks who want to show off their new toy to the boys in their MySpace Babylon 5 Fan Fiction club. For myself, I think I’ll wait a while until the lines disappear and inventories rise and the glitches worked out.