Hopeless Geek

We write Mac applications at work. We have several ideas for great iPhone apps (not the cheesy $5 ones, but real applications) that we’re working on. We can test on the simulator, yes, and that works most of the time, but it’s not perfect¹ and we do need to test on the device now and again so we decided to get a pair of iPhone 3Gs to start off with and see how the development process was.

First, we approached the local Apple Store’s business contact. He said that they don’t handle business orders for the iPhone at all and gave us a name at AT&T that handles small business orders and said that he’d get us set up. That person would be Christopher Spain. Remember that name, he’s going to be coming up a lot here soon.

So I went back to coding and let my business partner handle all the fun of getting this setup. He called Chris and left a voicemail message that first day. The next day we got some information back about how to get setup. Jer sent in the information that Chris needed and is told on a Tuesday that the phones will be delivered by Friday.

Friday comes and goes.

Jer calls Chris back, leaves another voicemail, and gets a call sometime later that day saying that he doesn’t know what went wrong and he’ll look into it. I start to see that this is going to suck so I call the AT&T Small Business line (866-ATT-SMBZ) and try to figure out where the phone order is in the process. I’m told there is no phone order and the account isn’t done being set up. To boot, if I want the Small Business line to take over the account they’ll need to close everything down and start over completely.

Say what, now?

So we poke at Chris again over email and voicemail, never actually getting him. The back-and-forth here took several days since Chris doesn’t answer the phone when it rings. Ever. He calls you back and seemingly makes a point to only call back about once a day. If you have a question after that call back, you get to wait a day for the answer. In fact, it appears that the only time that he ever actually answered the phone was if Jer called and called and called and Chris just got tired of the phone ringing.

When Jer finally does gets a hold of Chris, he tells us that some large number of iPhone orders were mysteriously cancelled, ours might have been one of them, and that he’s looking into it.

Okay, I’m sorry, but how stupid do you think we are? Really?

So we nod our heads and let him place the order “again” and are given a new date. We should expect delivery the following Tuesday.

Guess what doesn’t happen on Tuesday?

When we eventually get a hold of him he tells us that we needed to put down a $300-per-line deposit to get the phones (which haven’t been ordered yet). So Jer asks what can be done to get around this and we’re told to send in some recent bills and it’ll be taken care of. Okay. So we send in some bills to the fax number he gives us. He doesn’t receive it. We send it twice more. He doesn’t receive it. He gives us a new number. We send it again. He doesn’t receive it. Jer asks him to come by and pick it up in person. He does, the next day.

So then we’re told (more than two weeks have passed, mind you) that we’ve been approved for not needing a deposit and that the phones have been ordered, again.

The expected receipt date comes and goes, again.

So Jer tried calling him again. And again. And again. Nothing. So we called his manager (which I got from the Small Biz line when I called). His manager didn’t answer. Then we complain to the Small Biz line about the whole situation, and to their credit the agent seemed genuinely shocked and says he wrote everything down on the account.

Soon thereafter we get a call back from the manager. His response? “Well, you know, we’ve been really busy lately.” Wait, what? Seriously? That’s what you’re going to hang this on?

We wait a little longer and then Chris calls back and says he’s working on it. Then nothing.

This time, though, he actually disappears — phone, email, texting … nothing works. We wait for several days more because we’ve invested so many days in this and wind up with nothing more from Chris than he’s “working on it”.

So we decide that we’re done with this guy and willing to start over again and call the SmBiz line and do it that way. The agent says that since we have the account number (and have for weeks) we could have just gone to the AT&T store to order the phones and have been done with it. So, Jer then sent a nice “You’re fired.” email, text, and voicemail to Chris and off we go to the AT&T store to get setup.

Some small number of hours after ordering the phones at the AT&T store, we received notice that they shipped. We have tracking numbers. We can see that they’ll be delivered on Monday (that’s this past Monday). So, we show up Monday and … they’re there! And right as we’re about to setup the plan and walk off with our new phones … “Wait, what deposit?”

Yep! That’s right! Frigtard fucked up the “waive the deposit” paperwork, it was denied instead of approved, and he lied to us about it. Lied. Bald-faced lied to us.

So, with the phones mere inches away from our hands, we’re given the name of a “good” account representative and told that he’ll fix everything and we’ll have the phones in a couple of days. At this point I’m about to raise holy hell in the store but my weak little pacifist companions waive the rep off before I can get the engine going on the rage machine. After a false start and a stifled fury (which they get instead as it winds down) we go off to wait some more. Leaving the phones.

Over the past few days we’ve learned a lot more about this situation that was never explained to us:

• The application for the waiver needed three months of one bill, not three bills in general. Thus, it was denied for being filed improperly. He asked for the wrong information, filed it incorrectly, and was informed of this.
• He then lied to us about this and said it was all okay.
• He wasn’t going to get commission on the sale because he doesn’t cover our ZIP code. This explains the general apathy.
• He did this to someone else. A friend of mine works at a company that is also working with Chris and he’s doing the exact same thing to them. However, they’re a larger business and they’re activating their legal department on the issue. I’m going to love seeing how that one plays out.

So, today, finally, we have word that the deposit waiver was approved (since it was filed properly) and we can get our phones once that’s been applied to the account.

Later today we’ll head off to the store to see what other excuse AT&T can come up with for not giving us our phones. Yay.

¹ Some classes do not exist on the iPhone but they work in the simulator just fine. The problem is that the simulator must load Cocoa into memory because it’s a Cocoa app, so if we use some Cocoa classes that don’t exist on the iPhone they’ll still work in the simulator because they’re accessible there. Therefore, we get a silent failure. Case in point: NSXMLDocument.

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