I've been in line for a 3G iPhone for three and a half hours now. The line I am in hasn't moved in over an hour, and we were told that the activation servers are down. Apple and AT&T, you should have seen this coming.

Seriously, guys. Last year this process worked fairly well. You walked into the store, bought a phone, took it home, activated it, and you were all set. Sure, there were some problems, but by and large the process worked.

Today, the process isn't working.

There were only 30 people ahead of me in line when I got here. There are still 10 people in front of me, with only about 20 people having had their iPhones activated in the last 2.75 hours. The same story is unfolding upstairs at the AT&T store.

Basically, the number of activations flooding into the Apple/AT&T servers is overwhelming the system, making the process move slowly ... if it moves at all.

I haven't moved in an hour, and Apple has let no new people into the store to buy iPhones. Clearly the servers weren't prepared to handle the number of new iPhone activations.

Doesn't anyone at AT&T or Apple perform basic forecasting calculations?