I picked up an iPhone on Friday and 66 frustrating hours later, it’s finally working. There is no shortage of iPhone activation horror stories on the internet, but here’s mine.

Completed the activation process in iTunes at around 10 pm on Friday. Waited till 1:30 am. Still nothing. Went to bed. Woke up the next day and found the “Activation Complete” email.

The phone is now unlocked and iTunes thinks it’s activated. I could sync it and use it over wifi, but no phone service. And my old AT&T phone that I’m trying to replace still works. So something is definitely not right.

Since I could now play with the phone’s other features, I thought I’d just let AT&T sort this out on its own.

Monday morning - iPhone still not fully functional and old phone still works. So I finally called AT&T. To my surprise, I reached a human being in under a minute. I explained to him the situation; he put me on hold for about 5 minutes and then told me I have a “very old account” on a “different billing system”. So I have to go to an AT&T Store to upgrade my old phone. As bizarre as that sounded, I went down to the closest store with my two phones.

I arrived at the store and told the guy my ordeal so far. He said, “We don’t activate the iPhone here. You need to call 1-800-MY-IPHONE”. WTF!!! I repeated the story to the supervisor and he told the guy, “Oh, you need to upgrade him.” Ok, whatever. So he proceeded to make some changes to my plan and swapped out the SIM card on the old phone. How this is going to help get my iPhone to work, I had no idea. He then told me I had to reset the phone and finish the activation on iTunes. I very much doubted these two bozos knew what they were talking about. But I also didn’t see the point of wasting another minute with Dumb and Dumber.

Got home and of course, the phone still didn’t work. Called AT&T again and reached a rep after waiting 10 or so minutes. She looked at my account and told me it didn’t show that I have an iPhone. She said it is “mystifying” that I had received the “Activation Complete” email. She then put me on hold to talk to someone at Apple (how Apple can help me with a problem that is clearly AT&T’s is beyond me).

After more waiting, I reached an Apple rep. He sounded quite confident and told me to check a few things. Then he reassuringly told me he could help me and put me on hold while he talked to AT&T. So here I was, on hold again. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, someone picked up and went, “Thank you for calling AT&T. How may I help you?”. Arrrrgh! I had to start over from scratch?!

I had to calm myself down so I don’t yell at this poor lady who knew nothing of my conversation with her coworkers. I literally started from scratch and gave her my phone number. Just when I was seriously considering returning the damn phone and permanently severing all ties with AT&T, she figured out what was wrong. With two pieces from information from the iPhone box (ICCID and IMEI numbers), she fixed the problem within 5 minutes!

This is insane. It was such an easy fix for someone with a clue. This nice lady was in effect doing the work for all her clueless coworkers. They would’ve continued bouncing me around until I got to her or someone like her.

Anyway, there you have it. My version of AT&T Customer Service Hell.