WalkerPad

Man so many things I could blog about, mothers day (great shots), fire works, the school district trying their dambest to stick it to Charise and get rid of her as the CEA president before she can start, kaily being well 3 and really cute…

But no

I’m going to (like every other blogger in the country) talk about the iPhone launch. Or more specifically AT&T since the phone look sexy with nice design (has anyone every paid so much for some flash, and a essentially closed system at that :p) and is a total brick since I can’t activate it due to AT&T and I think number porting but since AT&T says they have a high call vollume and hangs up on me I might never know what the deal is.
Three things have happened so far that disturb me and suggest my relationship with AT&T as my vendor is going to be no better and possible a lot worse then that with Verizon.

The lies: during the retail launch I went to a AT&T/Cingular store near my house (Grant Avenue, actually it’s Grant Road but that’s another story, in Mountain View).

I showed up around 3:30PM. First question on everyone’s mind was how many do you guys have. They wouldn’t say, instead they told everyone to wait and that it would be ok.
This was CRAP, there was no reason to do this except pure laziness and not wanting to manage the line or resources responsible. I wasn’t to worried though there was only 38 some folks in front of me and I figured (correctly as it turned out) that they probable got a minimum of 50 phones.

Then they opened.

The line moved so slow, it took over two hours to process 37 some odd people. Why?

Because they lie, bald face lie. They where insisting that you MUST get a credit check to buy the phone. That made each sale take forever, particularly on a totally over loaded AT&T system.

The person in front of me and myself both told them to go pound sand when the trotted out the “we can’t sell you a phone without a credit check line”. The truth of course is you could do the credit check at home through iTunes. Or you could pay a fee (something they wouldn’t mention) of like a 250 deposit, or you could even get a goplan or whatever as a last resort. But they thought lying to us was better.
Meanwhile they cut line off at like 50 people leaving another 30 or so totally screwed having wasted hours. They offered them a drop ship order for like an extra 15 bucks or so or they could get a regular consignment fill after a week or so.
Why did they need to wait HOURS to find out they where out? The store clearly new how many iphones they had, they obviously could have handed out numbers or done any number of other things that would have been responsible to potential/current AT&T customers. Instead they decided to screw them and steal their time.
Why force the credit check, and agian they where flat out lying about this requirement at the store, insisting you had to have it. When I pushed back, the store manager rushed over to ‘explain’ to me why it was important. I still said no and they sold me the phone and the whole thing took like five minutes. The way it should have for the other 30+ people.
God, one of the worse crimes a retailer can commit is to wast it’s customers time and AT&T seemed quit comfortable doing that on multiple fronts.
The next lie. I was going to buy Charise a 4gig iPhone. The AT&T press release clearly stated 2 (TWO) phones per person. They woudln’t do it. The manager said it was only one and tried to suggest that press release only applied to apple stores (which it didn’t from the language on it). They insisted she had to be there. So I guess charise looses. Though at this point I have half a mind to walk away from the whole deal because of how bad AT&T has sucked.

And now I sit looking at my phone wondering how good it is because AT&T says it can’t finish activation until ” 1:24 EDT July 1st” because of something maybe having to do with number portability, the language is so totally unclear as to be almost uninterpretable. AT&T provided a helpfull number that, says sorry we are busy, or we are experiencing technical difficulties, try again later and hangs up.
Ah, a quality service to be sure.

Man cel companies sure you like you to work hard to take your money, but AT&T seems to be taking it to a whole new level :p. I can’t help but wonder what the world would be like if Apple had just sold them as unlocked phones and had a reasonable open system like palm for people to develop against it.. that would maybe would change the world a bit, but this? Meh.

Zats not funny

Mentions that that their store sold out in less then an hour so I guess not every AT&T store was forcing people to do credit checks by lying. Ah inconsistency, the mark of quality process . Anyway instead of AT&T hanging up on my (Saturday morning after iDay) they put my on hold for 10 or so minutes and then disconnect me after one ring, been bumped off 5 times now in a row. Almost a funny level of dysfunction… almost.

Engadget has a pretty empty blurb about the problems here but no real news