Meet the iBrick

30/06/07 02:53 Filed in: iPhone

Had To Have It
So tonight after reading about the many wonderous things people were doing with their snazzy new iPhones I finally break down and figure it's only a matter of time, so either buy it now or buy it later. I called the Apple Store over in San Jose. They're open until midnight, have stock on hand, and no line. I was a little surprised to find myself getting in the car at about 10pm driving the 45 minutes over to San Jose.
The Apple Store experience was a bit surreal, but fun as usual. Because the store was staffed for mayhem and the mayhem had clearly come and gone, the employees had formed a sort of greeting line and would let out a huge cheer whenever a new person came in asking for an iPhone or someone left with an iPhone bag. Since one of those two things was always happening it was a sort of black-shirted cheering gone mad festival experience. Demented and sad, but cheerful.
But I was in and out in less time that it takes me to buy a laté at Starbucks. It was exactly what I expected from Apple. Perfect.

Bad Coder, No Credit
The perfection ended when I got home. I knew that I'd need to activate the phone somehow, but I really didn't know what I was in for. It started out like I expected: Plug in, lauch iTunes, detect phone, start activation. Cool.

After entering in a few choice snippets of info I was shown the screen to the right. Basically they had denied my credit. Those that follow along with my Twitterings know that I've recently been very stressed about buying a house. As recently as 3 days ago I was approved for a loan of more than 3/4 of a million dollars. Yes, houses are kind of expensive here in California. Needless to say, my credit is pretty damn great.

I'm An Engineer, I Can Fix It
I spent the next couple hours trying to change various parameters -- billing/shipping addresses, iTunes account info, credit cards, etc. The behavior never changed. My device remains stuck in deactivated mode. An 8GB, multitouch, phone, ipod, and revolutionary internet device reduced to a shiny little flat thing with no function at all.
So I starting doing a little web browsing and it turns out I'm not the only one. I spent about an hour trying to find a customer service number. Nothing I tried ever got me anything more than a polite "call back on Monday" when our office is open. In desperation I posted to the AT&T forum asking how to get hold of a human.

Not Happy
Some other iBrick owner gave me the magic direct line: 1-877-419-4500
But I might as well have called a small shack in the middle of some other country (oh, wait, I think that's what actually happened) because they were absolutely powerless to do anything but say sorry and tell me to go to an AT&T location to get this fixed.
I eventually was escalated to Monica Schaar, a very patient person considering my tone of voice by this time. Monica was full of choice quotes like (paraphrased), "the systems are overloaded. We just didn't expect everyone all on one day." AT&T execs must watch different TV shows because even with just the couple shows a week that I do watch I was palpably aware that the 29th was going to be a very big deal. The Apple commercials made it crystal clear.

An Ice-Cube's Chance In Hell
In the end Monica could not do anything for me. She did agree to call me back personally on Monday. I'm guessing the odds of that happening are pretty slim, but you never know. Tomorrow I will brave the AT&T store, I'll let you know how it goes.