Plaidophile

So, this morning, between signing for the condo and going back to work, I stopped at an AT&T store to pick up a SIM for the iPhone. There was a short line ahead of me. One person in front of me was on the phone, talking in a very dramatic way to a regional manager about some terrible customer experience he suffered at the hands of something or other. I couldn't help but listen in (seeing as how he was loud enough to be heard throughout the whole store) and it was plainly obvious that he was ranting about his experience buying an iPhone 3G on Friday.

What I heard from his story is that he was in line for 4 hours when the Apple store first opened, and was turned away because of the activation issues. The woman in line next to him was "in tears" because of her inability to buy an iPhone (what). He was ranting and raving about how Apple and AT&T need to "get their act together" and how they should have gotten news about the activation failures into "all the papers" ("for the people who don't have Internet") so that people wouldn't have to wait in line for four hours to not be able to buy an iPhone. Furthermore, he refuses to go into an Apple store after his bad experience and was aghast that the AT&T stores were out of phones.

When he hung up, the salesperson who was trying to work with him said, "Well, you put on quite a performance." The guy said, "It's not a performance, it's all true! Apple and AT&T have made a mess of this!"

I just wanted to yell at him, "It's just a damn phone! If the fact you chose to stand in line for four hours for a luxury item and didn't immediately get what you want is the biggest problem in your life right now that you have to yell at some poor customer service person for hours about it, wasting everyone's time, then your life must be pretty good!"

But I just bought the SIM and left.