Preordering
The morning the Xbox Series X went up for preorder, I was sitting in a hospital room with my wife who had just given birth to our beautiful baby boy, Elijah.

I was able to carve out an hour when nothing was happening to try and log onto several sites with the hope that the hospital wi-fi wouldn’t fail me.

With customers across the country given adequate time to prepare — Microsoft made it a point to give notice of where, when, and how to preorder the new consoles — it was pretty much a given that things wouldn’t go smoothly.

And they didn’t.

Though I was able to get the console into my cart on one website, I wasn’t able to check out and confirm the purchase. One store didn’t even have their preorders up on time, and once they made the console available to purchase, I ran into issues there as well.

After about an hour of coming up short, I accepted the possibility of not being a day-one owner of a new Xbox and continued on with my day. I ran home for some errands and a hot shower and then returned to my wife and baby.

I checked Twitter — because misery loves company — and saw posts about resupplying and canceled orders. Someone else posted that someone they knew had just bought a console.

The post had been made recently, so I gave it a go and checked the store’s website. I saw a console still in my cart from the previous attempt, and I was able to go straight into checkout.

It seemed to be good to be true, but a few weeks later, I got an email asking me to reserve a date and time to pick up the console.

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