Little did I know that, at about the same time, the gremlins decided that today was the day to screw with me...
The local AT&T store was still out of stock, but we're lucky enough to have two Apple stores in Orlando. I called the Apple store at the closest mall to me while driving there to check availability and wait time. I waited on the phone for over 30 minutes, but at least I got a prompt every thirty seconds or so telling me how many calls were ahead of me in the queue. After getting to a person, I found out that they had plenty of phones in stock but the customer queue was about 4 or 5 hours long! By the time the call was done I was in front of the mall.
I called the other Apple store at another mall about 5 miles away. They said they had plenty of inventory but almost no line. Go figure! So I headed over there like... well, let's just say 'expeditiously'.
I walked through the mall, entered the queue, and waited for 45 minutes to get into the store escorted by a guy in a pale blue iPhone 3G tee shirt and flip flops. This would be my 'activation assistant'. Then the real fun began.
After telling the pale blue tee shirt guy that I wanted a black 16GB iPhone and the 900 minute calling plan, he gets the device and proceeds to scan in the serial number and SIM card information printed on the box. Then the activation process starts. He collects my existing phone number and my SSN last 4, and verifies my address from my driver's license. All of this was collected in the little mobile POS device. POS is an acronym for point of sale, although another possibility soon came to mind.
Of course, there was something on my account that thwarted the normal activation process. The handheld POS came back with an error, and so Mr. blue tee shirt called AT&T support. The guy on the phone got my account set up with the new SIM and device information, and changed the rate plan. OK, so a little snag but we recovered well. Or so I thought...
Then Mr. blue tee shirt tried to ring up the phone so I could pay for it. Whoops! The device rings up at $499. The price is supposed to be $299. Why the difference? According to the POS terminal, I don't qualify for the 'upgrade price' on the iPhone and have to pay full price, which is $200 more, and I still have to sign a 2 year contract.
Well, of course, I say that this is not acceptable. You see, I had heard about this pricing issue and went over to my AT&T store to verify that I qualified for the upgrade price. So why the change of tune now? According to the Apple guy, it's all AT&T's fault since their system is the one that says yea or nay to the upgrade based upon my account status. So he calls AT&T again to track it down.
15 minutes later, he's still on hold. Thinking he got mis-routed, he tries again.
35 minutes later, his call is answered and the dialog begins. After a while, it's determined that when the first agent activated the iPhone he made a mistake and went too far by assigning the iPhone service plan. When the Apple system called the AT&T system, it looked like my account already had an iPhone 3G on it, thus I didn't qualify for a 'second' upgrade.
Mr. blue tee shirt and the AT&T rep worked the problem for about 3 hours, and there was no possible way that they could find to activate the account for the upgrade price. There was no override capability for the AT&T system, nor was there a way for the Apple store to adjust the iPhone price.
Well, because the iPhone was activated, my working Blackberry worked no more. So now I had no phone and the prospects were dim. I suggested that they try to add the iPhone as a second line, cancel the first line and move the phone number over. This looked like it would work, but no, it couldn't be that easy. See, the Apple POS system insisted that the iPhone was already sold and couldn't be sold again.
In the end, the Apple folks gave me a new iPhone to get around this problem. They had to pull the SIM from the first one and put it in the second one to make it work. Unfortunately, they ran out of the black phones an hour before and so I had to take a white one. They gave me a voucher written on the back of a business card to exchange the white one for a new black one when more were in stock.
In the end, I spent over 5 hours and 45 minutes getting the iPhone working; 45 minutes in line and 5 hours pulling hair through the sales and activation process. Apple is going to have to dump two perfectly good 16GB iPhones and probably resell them as refurbished. I have to go back to the store and exchange the phone again (hopefully this time they'll just swap the SIM).
I have a working phone, and it's nice, but all of this leaves me wondering why these systems are so brittle and so restrictive. They've had a long, long time to plan and test. What's the excuse?
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