Let me see if I understand correctly:

1. You got up at(or waited up until) 4:30 a.m. your time to order a phone on the day of its release.

2. You received an e-mail telling you that your order had been submitted for processing.

3. At some point, you decided that you should have received a "processing" e-mail.

4. Now you're finding out "anecdotally" that others have placed orders after yours, but received e-mails before you did.

5. You were OK with this until you realized that someone, somewhere would have the precious phone a tad earlier than you did.

I can see what happened. Verizon's system shut down, for whatever reason, early in the morning. Orders received during a certain time had to be processed manually. Whenever they could be.

Verizon got their system back up and was able to use it to process new orders as they came in. Those manual orders had to wait a bit.

So--if your order had gone through at 4:30 a.m. on July 15, when would you receive your phone? If the date would have been July 23, what are you complaining about?