iPhone nothing but trouble

Here's a blog post about activating an iPhone and all the trouble people are going through. This one is chronicled in pretty good detail, so I'll use it as an example. Some memorable quotes:

I gave her my phone number and she told me that the SIM chip in my phone was incompatible with my phone number.

Huh? The iPhone doesn't use a sim card, or at least one that the customer can access. But the CSR was undeterred.

she told me that she had been doing these activations all day and that there was indeed a chip I needed to put into my phone

So either the CSR was lying, or she is admitting she spent all day activating iPhones giving out incorrect information, or there really is a way to access the sim chip in the iPhone.

This time the customer service rep told me that the problem with my account is that my bill on my AT&T account is in arears...less than one month's service by the way

Apparently when activating your iPhone, you can't simply upgrade the phone normally, you need to pay off your previous bill and start a fresh contract. Maybe?

Apparently my activation can't take place because my wife has too old a phone. I have to order a new phone for her in order to activate.

Am I reading this right? A customer just spends $500 on a phone, increases his monthly service contract, and AT&T refuses to activate the new phone because another phone, on ANOTHER LINE, is old? What does that have to do with anything? Pretty convenient that AT&T can't activate two different phones (maybe with different sim chip versions?) on the same account, this is a billing issue not a technology issue. If AT&T had told me this I would have to ask "Why is that my problem?" and returned the iPhone.

38% of people are having a problem activating their iPhones.

I'd call that a disaster!

She also disputed the previous agent who said that my wife's old phone was incompatible with the family plan.

I'd say so! The phone isn't "incompatible" with the "plan", its just that AT&T may or may not want to sign up certain phones with their plans. This is one reason why I always get a GSM phone with a SIM card that I can swap to any phone. I don't need to be told that I need to buy a brand new phone just because AT&T decides to change its billing.

Any other iPhone disaster stories to share?