There we were: eyewitnesses to history.
"Do you want to be part of a cell phone documentary about a cell phone?" asked Emiliano Hidalgo.
"Sure," said Tommy Oyarzun.
It was 5:45 on Friday evening and we were all standing in front of the Apple Store at The Gateway, where in 15 minutes the doors would open and Oyarzun would be the first person at this particular location to buy a brand new iPhone, which just a few minutes earlier he had described as "the coolest thing besides sliced bread."
"Since sliced bread," another young man corrected him. Well, it had been a long night.
Hidalgo pulled out his own, slightly more antiquated cell phone, took Oyarzun's picture and typed in the answers to his interview questions. Immediately the documentary was broadcast to "people I know, family and friends."
"I already did one about IKEA," Hidalgo explained. (IKEA? Wasn't that so six-weeks-ago?)
Tommy Oyarzun was interviewed many times on Friday evening. Every media outlet in town was there, embedded at the front of the line in this latest skirmish in the technological revolution.
The iPhone is a $599 phone-camera-iPod-Web browser that you can navigate by simply touching the screen. As John O'Brien of the Courier-Mail in Queensland, Australia, wrote this week, "Not since '2001: A Space Odyssey' has a bunch of ape-like creatures become so excited over a rectangular object."
In what has become a de rigueur marketing strategy for these kinds of things, Apple announced it would start selling the iPhone at 6 p.m. on Friday. All over the country, people started lining up hours, sometimes days, in advance. Tommy Oyarzun of Midvale was first in line at The Gateway, having arrived on Thursday at 3 p.m.
Mall security periodically accused him of loitering, Oyarzun says, so he spent much of Thursday night "pretending I was doing something." Eventually his girlfriend brought him a pizza. She also locked her keys in the car; by then other iPhone buyers had arrived to wait in line, so they helped Oyarzun break into her car with a metal flyswatter.
By nearly 6 p.m. on Friday, several hundred people were standing in line. Suddenly a dozen very cheerful people in black T-shirts rushed down the sidewalk. "iPhone, iPhone, iPhone," they chanted. "Keep it going," shouted one of the T-shirt people, who turned out to be Apple employees. "Let's have some energy here." Then another one of them said, "We're going to do a wave!"
The crowd, hot and tired by now, responded half-heartedly. Then there was shouting from inside the Apple Store and suddenly the black paper that had been covering the windows was pulled down, revealing an oversized, pretend version of the iPhone, complete with a countdown clock.
"Six-five-four-three-two-one!"
Then the doors opened and we were enveloped in air conditioning, and the first 20 people in line rushed into the store. Within seconds, Tommy Oyarzun was at the counter with his credit card. There were microphones being thrust toward his face, and reporters with notebooks were recording the moment.
"How does it feel to be the first person to buy an iPhone?" they asked.
"Cool. It's really cool."
E-mail: jarvik@desnews.com