The most successful thing I bought today was NOT the iPhone 4, but rather this packet of candy. Apparently, even though our iPhone 3GS phones were purchased on the exact same day (within 30 minutes of each other!), my husband Chip was eligible for the upgrade and I was not without an additional $200 early upgrade fee or waiting till March. I understand this was totally our mistake. We checked our eligibility before we reserved our phones, saw the "$18 upgrade fee" for both phones, but failed to see the fine print of mine only qualifying for "early upgrade" status. I get it. We goofed. (I’ll also go ahead and say for the record AT&T didn’t make it obvious I wasn’t eligible, either.)

We almost shrugged and took our $200 loss, but I decided to take a chance and asked the in-store AT&T rep if there was any way we could get that fee waived especially since Chip had been a loyal AT&T customer for at least 15 years. To our surprise, they worked their magic and told Apple to sell me a phone at $199. We were thrilled! Unfortunately, that’s when the problems started.

When the Apple store rep started ringing up my new shiny phone and SIM card, the Apple system would bark that I was not eligible for an upgrade. See, instead of changing my eligibility date, AT&T listed me as "upgraded" — as in "this person just received an iPhone 4." If I had gone to an AT&T store, that wouldn’t be a problem. They would just ring up the phone at the discounted rate at the register like any normal business then update my phone details to my account after the sale.  But, you see, Apple isn’t setup that way. The way their system is setup, they can only sell you a new iPhone 4 if you are a) buying a new one without a contract ($499-$599); b) buying a new one with a new contract ($199), which I wasn’t eligible for because I HAVE an active contract; or c) upgrading my phone, which normally costs $199 if eligible or $399 if upgrading early. But according to my AT&T/Apple record, I was already supposed to have a new iPhone 4, so I’m now not eligible to upgrade till 2012!

Translation: AT&T waived my fee with no problem, but Apple had no way of manually overriding their checkout system on the spot to sell me a phone at the new contract or upgrade rate. The only thing they could offer was to escalate the case and have me come back tomorrow and try again. They told me this after SEVEN HOURS IN LINE AFTER AN HOUR DRIVE TO THE APPLE STORE.

To make matters worse, in the process of sorting things out they completely deactivated my current phone. They started to send me home without a working phone, then back pedaled after I balked. They tried for 30 minutes to figure out how to restore service to my phone before randomly trying our suggestion which was "stick another SIM card in and see if it works."

So, long story short: we are going back tomorrow to see if Apple can do math without a calculator, er, I mean, figure out how to manually discount a phone sale. (I tease, I tease.)

I have to admit, I was surprised the AT&T in-store reps didn’t have more rights to handle account questions/details. (Seriously, they had to call customer service for just about everything — including requests to change phone numbers for people. People waited for hours.) But I’m even more shocked that Apple didn’t have ANY method for handling manual transactions/overrides. Crazy.

Hopefully we’ll have better luck tomorrow.