Rocky Road To Yak's Bend : GW2

How the plan is meant to go:

Wake up around 7.30am. *** Make cup of tea, butter some toast while PC gets itself sorted. *** Click little red dragon to see if servers came up early. If so, log in. If not, wait for scheduled start at 8 am. *** Log in my account and make a Charr Ranger on Yak's Bend. *** Log in Mrs Bhagpuss's account since she'll already have left for work and can't do it herself. *** Make two placeholder characters on Yak's Bend for her, to reserve the names she wants. *** Stop being her, go back to being me.  *** Make guild. *** Play 'til I pass out.

How the plan does, in fact, go:

Wake up at 7.00am. *** Make cup of tea, eat cereal while PC wakes up. *** Type password repeatedly for an hour or so for the chance to see this message ***

Click through once to see this explanation ***

Finally decide to google and see if anyone knows anything more useful *** Discover it really is a Firewall issue, not login server congestion after all *** Switch off Firewall *** Log in immediately *** Find three-quarters of US servers full *** Including Yak's Bend *** Panic ***

Make Charr Ranger on Borlis Pass on grounds that a) Borlis Pass is quite near Yak's Bend and b) it's available *** Make two characters for Mrs Bhagpuss but only get one of the names she wants, the other already having been taken *** 

Play uncomfortably for a while, worrying about people we were planning on meeting up with probably now being on Yak's Bend while we are on Borlis Pass *** Make guild anyway, since I now have the one silver fee required *** 

Look in Gem Store for server move options. Can't find any. *** Tab out and google "GW2 Server Moves" and find it's an option from Character Select *** Log out to Character Select, find the button, see that all the US servers that were "Full" are now just "High". *** Move all characters to Yak's Bend. *** Heave sigh of relief.

Make a coffee *** Play with much more pleasure and enthusiasm for two hours ***

Get suddenly and unexpectedly disconnected *** Try to log back in only to see my old friend "Guild Wars 2 has encountered an error" *** Disable Firewall again, this time to no effect ***

Hence this post. If I could be playing I would be playing. Ah well, could be worse. We're on the right server, 50% of the names wanted were available (okay, just the one name but it sounds more impressive as a percentage) and I got to play for nearly three hours. For day one of a headstart that's well above par.

Time for lunch. Let's hope I'm not back here later on today.