Black Friday came early this year; I guess you could call it sort of a "Grey Thursday". I saw an ad for a sale CompUSA was having from 9pm to midnight on Thanksgiving Day, as a way of jump-starting the whole Friday after Thanksgiving start of the Christmas shopping season thing. So just for the sheer heck of it, Leila and I decided to check it out.

We drove to CompUSA in Culver City after we left Jonna and Jeff’s. We arrived around 7:30 and already there was a long line from the front door and along one side of the store. It was a little chilly out, so Leila drove back home to get us some sweaters and a thermos of tea while I held our spot in line.

It was fun waiting in line- I talked tech with several people on line with me, which was a lot of fun. A couple looking at a 32" HDTV on sale for $499 asked me about the stats they should look for. Another guy sought my advice on DVD burners and  printers. I talked with some other people about wireless routers, laptops, the pros and cons of various gizmos on sale, and those forever burning hard drive questions: internal, or external, what capacity, SATA or PATA! (You know, geek stuff!)

By the time Leila got back with warm clothes and tea, the line looped around the entire parking lot, and the TV news channels had arrived. Before opening the doors at 9pm, the CompUSA management warned everyone in line not to rush the doors, stampede, or otherwise get rowdy as a crowd at Best Buy had done recently. Luckily everything was pretty orderly as we surged into the store. By the time Leila and I got inside, it was pretty much a madhouse.

People were grabbing at the better of the deals. I walked right past a pile of my intended target: 160GB Seagate SATA hard drives stacked in the front of the store (on sale for an unheard of $20 each) and made a beeline for the hard drive section where I found an unmolested stack of these drives. Granted, 160GB isn’t much storage these days… but for $20? I grabbed two of them, and Leila and I made it into the checkout line before much of the mad rush.

So I spent $40 for 320GB- not too shabby for an hour and a half’s wait in line.

To add to the oddness of it all, I managed to find myself in a few frames of the evening news. Just in case, I set the Tivo-PC to record the evening news, to catch the story on these various "day before" sales events.

I doubted we’d be in any of the shots, since I hadn’t really seen too many cameras pointed our way, but sure enough, when I went back through the recording, there I was for a few frames, in line at some point while Leila was away. I saved a screencap (above) for the blog.