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“Guess who’s getting a new iPhone today?” is the first thing I said after surfacing. I had just jumped into the hour-glass shaped pool at The Avalon Beverly Hills… with my phone in my pocket. Sean and Christian groaned as I lay the dripping phone in the sun. At that moment I wasn’t going to let this ruin my morning, but it would end up ruining my afternoon.

After getting a bit sunburned, we headed out to pick up a new phone and find some lunch. The nearest Apple store was in Century City, just down Olympic. The apple store had a cordoned off area on the right side of the store where you had to wait to be “pre-qualified” to buy a phone. This involved talking with an employee with a hand-held, who would check to see if you were eligible to purchase a phone, I didn’t think I would have much trouble. It turns out that because I had a corporate discount on my plan I had to purchase a phone in an AT&T store, and Apple wouldn’t be able to sell me one right there. We left and found the nearest AT&T just down the block where we found out that they don’t keep iPhones in stock. You have to order one, and wait 7-10 days until it gets delivered, this wouldn’t do, as I needed my phone for work in less than 24 hours. We finally came to the conclusion that if they removed the corporate discount from my phone, I could go back to the Apple store, purchase a phone, and have the discount re-applied after activation.

Back at the Apple store later that day.

“We can’t sell you a phone because you’re out of market”

“What does that mean?”

“Here in California, AT&T has a different system than the East Coast.”

“What can we do about this?”

“Nothing”

Borrowing Sean’s phone, I called back the AT&T store we were just at and explained the situation. The final answer was to buy a phone with a new California contract, take it home and activate it, and Monday morning call AT&T and have them disconnect the California number. So that’s what happened; after two trips back and forth between Apple and AT&T, and more than a dozen calls to customer service, I have replaced my original phone with the new 3G version. Everyone involved was very helpful, employees of both companies bent over backwards to help me navigate a stupid, backwards inter-corporation tangle of rules, and networks meant to maximize profits and obfuscate something that should be simple.