5 days
Well I queued in the Apple store and managed to take my phone away at 4pm after waiting since 7 in the morning. at 10.30pm last night the SIM card finally sprang into life. It's a nonsense that O2 couldn't predict the volume of activations. Just add up the total number of O2 stores, Carphone Warehouse stores and Apple stores, work out an average number of employees per store, work out how long an activation should take then work out how many of those can be done in an hour and multiply all these up and bingo!
so it goes:
(Apple Stores x CPW stores x O2 stores) x number of employees x (60 / number of minutes per activation) = maximum number of activation requests per hour.
This would have been an over the top figure but they should have ramped up their facilities to deal with it, whoever in the place couldn't figure that out and ramp up their OSS systems to deal with it should be sacked.