Just wanted to follow up to say that it took getting pissed publicly on Reddit to get some action, but BitInstant's CEO, Chris, did finally, personally drive my 3 BTC over in his virtual armored car to btc-e.com and put them in my account.

To new readers of this thread I would not recommend doing business with BI until we see a follow-up statement on bitinstant.com about this week's snafu and how they have learned from it. Not some shit buried away in a reddit thread or in this forum, but an actual postmortem and steps they are taking to address it.  I commend these guys for handling an insane customer service load and probably getting very little sleep, but when you are dealing with people's money, and the word "instant" appears in your value proposition, you can't put users through this.

Thanks Charlie and Ursay. I appreciate your resolving the issue and adding the $ delta lost in the time I had to wait. That was a respectable gesture.