Who needs fancy psychics, Shirley MacLaine, or expensive past-life regression hypnosis? If you want to know what kind of person you were in your previous lives, just look at what kind of luck you have with delivery times for Apple Store preorders. It's true! One side effect of Steve's Reality Distortion Field is that the constant bombardment by existence-bending zeta rays has made Apple far more attuned to the karmic forces of the universe than any other computer manufacturer out there, and shipping dates for Apple Store orders serve as a startlingly accurate barometer of past-lives behavior. Or misbehavior.

For example, you've seen this scenario a gazillion times before: one guy orders his Power Mac G5 at the height of a backorder drought and mysteriously receives his gear a mere two days later, with free overnight shipping and maybe a complimentary basket of mini-muffins. Meanwhile, another guy who preordered his G5 three seconds after Steve unveiled them last June is still waiting, and his Order Status now says "will ship on or before March (maybe, if we feel like it)."

Well, guess why? In their previous lives, Guy A obviously spent most of his time donating food and clothing to orphanages, whereas Guy B invented telemarketing. Karma takes care of the rest. Which is why we were seriously starting to think that in our last incarnation, we really did sic the hounds on innocent young 'uns just to watch 'em run; our Panther preorder was supposed to arrive today, but as of 2 AM, our Order Status was still "Open" and no shipping confirmation had yet graced our inbox.

But then, deliverance! Apple finally upgraded our Order Status to "Shipped" at 3 AM, and FedEx left a box at the front door of the AtAT compound at 10:40 this morning. (Incidentally, the shipping box looked like it had been taped shut by a monkey going through heroin withdrawal; apparently Apple had a lot of orders to fill at the last minute.) There was, indeed, a shiny new copy of Panther inside, and since we received it over nine hours before it officially goes on sale in retail, we can only conclude that we did something at least marginally good the last time we walked this earth. Like maybe we bought a lot of Girl Scout Cookies and always changed our oil every three thousand miles.

But what about those of you who never preordered Panther in the first place-- how can you find out what kind of a person your life force previously inhabited? Well, it turns out that waiting to buy it at Apple retail store tonight during Night of the Panther may bring some karmic rewards, too; MacRumors reports that anyone buying a copy of Panther during tonight's shindig may qualify for 10% off anything else they happen to grab off the shelves. (Reportedly the same unadvertised promotion ran during last year's Jaguar launch parties.) So whereas we got Panther nine hours early, you get the chance to toss in, say, a 40 GB iPod for $50 off. Well, well, well... sounds to us like somebody practiced impeccable dental hygiene in a previous life!