My iPhone nightmare

I got one of the new iPhones on Friday. Yes, I waited in line, but no, I'm not one of those people who camped out or anything crazy like that.

That's great for them if they want to do that and have the time to waste, but I don't.

I decided to get the iPhone because I wanted something that works well with my Mac, that would replace my aging and increasingly flaky Palm Tungsten PDA and my Motorola cell phone.

I drove by 15 minutes before the AT&T store opened up, got in line, and had one of the very last available iPhones on the island (Big Island of Hawaii). I think they had about 3 left, and according to a friend who went to Hilo to the one other place on the island you could get one, they were out before the Kona store.

Anyway, as you probably know, instead of activating the phone in the store, you take it home and plug it into your Mac or PC and use iTunes.

The phone doesn't work at all until you do (except to call 911). Sadly this means that you can't even use it as an MP3 player, to put your appointments on, etc.

So I unpacked the iPhone and I have to say, it is a gorgeous piece of technology; the videos and pictures on TV and online do not do it justice.

I plugged it in, iTunes opened, and I went through the process of activating the phone. At the end, it says it's activating it, which will take up to 3 minutes.

After a minute or so, it goes to a screen saying "Your activation requires additional time to complete", and that I'd get an email when it was done.

I figure it's just that the servers that are handling activations are overwhelmed, so I let it sit and go do something else.

Minutes pass.

Hours pass.

I give up and go to bed.

In the morning, I have an email saying I need to call an 800 number because there is a problem.

I call and I get told that the plan I chose was incompatible with the iPhone -- the stupid thing about this, is that I never was given a choice of which plan to use, it just said I would keep my current plan and the data part would be converted to the iPhone data plan.

I say OK, change me (even though it means I'll get fewer minutes) and the woman on the other end of the phone tells me that she can't do this, and she has to transfer me to another number.

She puts me on hold and I wait for several minutes and end up with a guy in India who doesn't apparently have any notes to look at on what's been done so far, so I have to re-explain. He gets the gist of it, and says he's going to switch me over to the new plan, and it'll take up to 24 hours for it to work.

Not seeing any other choice, I thank him, hang up, and wait.

Sunday rolls around, more than 24 hours go by, and no change. Same "Your activation requires additional time" message in iTunes.

I've been reading forums on ThinkSecret to get some ideas on what to do, seeing suggestions about getting a new SIM card (the card inside the phone that identifies it as yours on the network), and others.

I go into the AT&T store in town where I bought the iPhone and the woman who rung me up on Friday is there. She looks at my account and tells me the problem is I have a "blue" account instead of an "orange" account -- in other words, I have an old account which is incompatible.

My account was set up under AT&T when I first moved here in 2001, before they became Cingular, before they became AT&T again, and since I've deliberately avoided getting a new contract for years now, I'm still under the old system. I'd had a feeling this was what the problem was.

The woman at the AT&T store called up a number and got a guy on the phone, and told him I had a blue account and needed to switch to an orange.

I talked to him, told him which plan I wanted, and he said he'd taken care of it and I needed to just go and activate it via iTunes. He also said there was no record of anyone trying to change my plan on Saturday. So apparently the guy in India lied to me and didn't do anything.

I left the store and went to a public WiFi network and tried, but got the same "needs additional time" message.

Drove home, tried again, called the number the woman at the AT&T store gave me.

The woman at the other end sounded very sympathetic and helpful and said the guy I'd talked to earlier today had changed my plan, but didn't change the account from blue to orange! Despite the fact that the woman in the AT&T store who had called him for me told him that was what the problem was!

So then the woman on the phone told me she couldn't fix the problem, and I needed to be transferred to someone who could.

I was put on hold and sat for about 50 minutes. Finally I heard the phone ring -- I was being connected to someone who could fix the problem!

No, instead, I got hung up on!

I'd been patient, if not too happy, up till this point.

I got pretty angry and swore for a minute or two.

I called back and guy a somewhat-too-cheerful guy who seemed to be surprised that the woman I'd been speaking to an hour before that had claimed not to be able to change my account from blue to orange. Apparently she lied to me too.

Mr. Too-Cheerful said could change me from blue to orange by upgrading my service to another phone (neither my old phone or my new iPhone), then switching the service over to my iPhone.

To do this whole thing, naturally, he disabled my old SIM card, so my old cell phone no longer works.

He then told me it could take up to SEVENTY TWO HOURS for this to complete!

After reassuring me several times that it would work, and I just needed to be patient, I got off the phone. Before I did, he told me how I could check my voicemail from my land line.

I called to test it and discovered that my outgoing message is now gone, and it's been replaced with a generic "not available at this time" message. AND, I can't sign in to re-record it or check my messages, or anything.

So if anyone calls me for the next three days, or however long it takes to activate, they'll get a generic message, and I have no idea if any voicemail they leave will get to me.

Which means if any clients or potential new clients for my consulting business call me, or anyone tries calling me at all, they can't reach me. Which can mean lost business, and a general huge headache for me.

I have been fortunate enough not to have to ever really deal with AT&T/Cingular's customer service before, and I hope I never have to again.

I have been lied to repeatedly, hung up on, and if they'd known what they were doing and had actually told me what the real problem was in the first place, I wouldn't have wasted two days waiting, and it might have been resolved by now, and I wouldn't have to vent on this blog, hoping it gets ranked in Google so people find out about my experience!