My plan this year was to try to skip the whole lining up at Stupid O’clock routine but still get the iPhone 4S on or very near to launch day. I set an alarm to wake me up a little before 2:00AM Central time last Thursday night / Friday morning – to try to get a pre-order done with Apple.
Unfortunately I overslept by a bit and when I got up Apple’s pre-order pages were up the spout, not able to communicate with AT&T to confirm upgrade eligibility and so on.
So, against my best judgment, I switched to doing a pre-order through AT&T. The process seemed to go well enough. The site clearly showed that my order would be delivered on 10/14, iPhone 4S launch day. No maybe or possibly was indicated – it was a sure thing for 10/14 delivery from what I could see. I placed my pre-order, and I got my confirmation email within a couple of minutes, and I went back to bed.
The next morning I started seeing people talking about their problems with pre-orders and in particular some wildly varying shipping times from AT&T. So I looked at my confirmation email again and went to order tracking page linked within the mail. It showed my order as ‘processing’. I thought OK, I’ll give it a while. But after 16 hours from the time of my order and the email confirmation, the order still showed as just ‘processing’.
Here’s what happened next:
— I was worried that the order seemed to be stuck at the processing stage so I tried the first number I could find for AT&T Customer Service. I couldn’t get through – so I got on their Live Chat and asked about my order status.
— The Live Chat rep initially said she couldn’t advise at all on order status, then changed her mind after speaking to a colleague and said ‘2-3 weeks’ for delivery. This was before I had even given her my name or an order number or any details. I asked how she could know without any details – and she seemed to imply that all pre-orders were on that timeframe. That struck me as nonsense so I asked for a better contact for order status queries. She gave me a phone number I hadn’t been able to find that was meant to be specifically for help with pre-orders.
— I called the pre-orders / Order Status line. The rep there took my order number and name and said my delivery was set for 10/14. I was surprised and briefly happy and then quickly suspicious. I told her I had just spoken to another rep who had said 2-3 weeks and asked why / how their information could be so different. She went away to speak to a supervisor and came back and cheerfully said something along the lines of ‘Oops, yes – it is 2-3 weeks for your delivery’.
So I canceled my order. Oh, and did I mention that despite being clueless and useless at offering a real, reliable delivery date the one thing AT&T had been quite efficient at was taking out (or putting a hold on) the money for the iPhone 4S in my bank account (the funds have since been restored).
If AT&T had not provided an entirely false timeframe for delivery on their pre-order page, I would have kept trying with Apple. If they would not have left my order in a ‘processing’ state for all of Friday, I could have jumped back onto an Apple pre-order. But of course by the time I had worked my way through their numskullery, even Apple pre-orders were not set for delivery by launch day.
It’s my own fault. I’ve seen in years past that AT&T are clueless and useless on launch events like this. Just as one example, here’s an excerpt from my post about waiting on the iPhone 3G at an AT&T outlet back on its launch day in 2008:
As best we could make out from AT&T staff who were pleasant and trying hard, but who were obviously forbidden from giving anything in the same neighborhood as a straight answer, was that they had been given around 40 phones. Despite this, they had happily watched something like 175 people spend 5 hours in the Texas heat – and waited until they had around 10 phones left to start letting anyone know things looked bad for serving the vast majority of those in the line. And believe me, tons of people were asking about the supply of phones / stock status in relation to size of the line since bright and early.
I don’t know whether the communication from Apple to AT&T is terrible, or the communication from AT&T to their own field and customer service staff is horrific, or whether it’s a combination of both of these. All I do know is that dealing with AT&T at times like this generally leads to nothing but frustration.
So yes, I will trying to go to bed early this Thursday night and getting up in the wee hours of the morning and lining up outside my local Apple Store. I’m sure it will be a long, tiring day. But at least I have faith (based on past experience) that Apple staff will know how many phones they have, will not keep people needlessly waiting. That they’ll know their ass from their elbow.
Image Source: bestfunnystuff.com
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TAGS: iphone 4s, iPhone 4S launch day, iPhone 4S pre-orders
