iPhone Diary Day 3: Porting problems persist

I'd describe my iPhone experience as 50% bliss and 50% hell. My wife's iPhone was a new AT&T activation that took all of three minutes to complete. I elected to port my mobile number from Verizon to AT&T and it has been a total nightmare.

After initially telling me that porting my number would take up to 6 hours to complete, AT&T emailed me to say it would take about 24 hours. After 24 hours came and went, I called AT&T waited on hold for over an hour. After giving them my Activation ID (from the email) and being put on hold six more times I was told that my billing info was "set up wrong" and that someone "put in the wrong codes." Worse yet, to get it resolved I was told that I had to call customer service on Monday, because they are closed on Sundays.

WTF AT&T? Your customer service is closed two days after your biggest product launch in history?

AppleInsider has an interesting tip for porting "ineligible" phone numbers to AT&T, but mine is an iBrick and there's no way to "start the activation process over again in iTunes" as the article suggests.

And apparently I'm not the only one. An Engadget poll says that 38% of 7,000+ people that answered the poll are still dead in the water. With an estimated 1.5 million 500,000 iPhones sold, that's a lot of pissed off customers. In fact if I didn't have a second iPhone to use, I'd be a lot more pissed off too.

Note to Steve Jobs: pick up the phone, call the CEO of AT&T and tell them to drag their asses into the office and get all these activation and porting problems fixed right now or that you'll cancel the exclusive contract with them due to non-performance.

Sheesh.