apple store opening

So I went to the opening of the new Apple Store in Dallas on Saturday morning. Didn’t camp out or anything; just drove up around 9:55 for the 10 a.m. opening.
On the (not very long) drive over, I was thinking that there might not be the legendary lines and hubbub around this opening that there have been historically. An Apple Store is a lovely thing for Mac fans who have historically felt isolated in a sea of PC users. But Dallas already has two Apple Stores, one of them less than five minutes’ drive from the new location.
After all, there’s nothing really special about a new Apple Store. They sell the same stuff as everywhere else. So while I was angling to get one of the t-shirts they give out at grand openings, I wasn’t expecting to see many other people.
Um, I was extremely wrong. What a sea of people! I left my crowd-estimating skills in the car, but it was certainly into the several hundreds of people waiting in line — a line that extended the length of that section of the mall and looped around. I couldn’t even see the store from where I was through all the people.
There was no way I was going to stand in line, but I took out my cell phone, turned on its camera, and snapped a pic of the line from a distance. And not two seconds later, a thug security guard comes up to me and gets in my face. “Who are you with? What news organization are you with?”
Huh? I mean, normally I have a good answer to that one. But in this case, I wasn’t with any news organization. I was a guy going to the Apple Store and taking a crappy picture with his crappy phone.
Anyway, I was sternly ordered to never take a photo in the NorthPark mall again. God forbid that NorthPark get good PR for hosting a big event. I turned around and left.