Everyone's Freaking Out About The Apple Watch

Now that the Apple Watch is set to launch in stores and via home delivery on Friday, April 24 (finally), the Internet panic is setting in. As tech enthusiasts all over the globe — or at least the select countries where the new product will be released this week — wait anxiously for their gadgets to arrive, they are (no surprise) taking to Twitter to voice their anxieties and their excitements about the upcoming launch. What exactly are they saying — or not saying?

I must be unfamiliar with the world of Apple fans, because I was rather surprised to see what people were tweeting about. Instead of long strings of emojis intended to express how excited they were to be able to operate their phone from their wrist with their new watch that looks like a tiny tablet, people were mostly expressing frustration with Apple. Their main complaint? That the company had not confirmed shipment on their deliveries. This complaint confused me. Of course many of the watches have not been shipped yet. There are thousands of orders, and it isn't even an officially launched product yet. Why the impatience?

I have a theory that people become more impatient when they have a specific date in mind to focus their impatience on. For example, the specificity of the release date — April 24 — makes people think maybe they can beat the system just by wanting it enough.

Some people directly addressed Apple, or the company's CEO Tim Cook, in their pleas for shipment confirmations.

Others emphasized how tiring it was to wait for days on end for a product that they frankly just couldn't wait to have.

Some Twitter users pined for the product they couldn't have, while others brought to mind an image of a girl sitting by the phone waiting for her crush to call — or a techie listlessly staring at the monitor screen.

But not everyone was sitting patiently, quietly waiting for their new watches to arrive. Some people, like me, were just as bemused by the hype.