Today I’m ditching AT&T and Apple and signing up with Verizon and Motorola.  Pretty certain I’ll choose a Droid X, but I’d like to see one first hand before I decide.   But that’s not really important.   What is important is how AT&T and Apple lost a 10-year-long customer.

Last year in May I finally upgraded my dying first-gen iPhone to a shiny new iPhone 3GS.   I owned the original iPhone for nearly four years and it had never failed me; overall a very satisfying experience.   It was really a no-brainer to upgrade to the 3GS, though my timing was a bit terrible (a few weeks later the iPhone 4 was released).   Regardless it worked out well and I’m not exactly a bleeding-edge type of guy anyway.

The 3GS worked quite good for about six months.   Around the beginning of November it began to act strangely.   I’d miss calls and was convinced the phone had never rang.   Voicemails and text messages would arrive 24 hours–if not more–after they’d been sent.   Initially I chalked this up to congestion on AT&T’s network, yet after driving most of the way across the country and experiencing the same problem I began to suspect the iPhone itself as the culprit.

Sure enough, after arriving in Kentucky around Christmas time the phone finally quit.   Attempts to restore it back to factory stock and backups from iTunes failed to work consistently.   Either it wouldn’t restore at all or would work for a day or two and go back to being bricked.   Many thousands of miles away from home and needing a phone for both work and communication on the road trip back, I traveled a few hours up to Nashville to the closest Apple store.   Much to my satisfaction it was replaced no questions asked, though I did have to drive a distance in order to do so.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago.   The replacement 3GS began to act eerily similar: I started missing calls and voicemails.     I use this phone for business and it is my only phone number, so unreliability for me is completely intolerable.   A few days after the initial flakiness it began the “bricked” behavior again, so I visited the local AT&T store in Redding since the Apple store is 2 hours distant.   I was fully expecting an apology and another replacement which would have left me satisfied, but a little frustrated.

But oh no, that isn’t how this worked out.   What transpired is a textbook example of how not to treat a customer, especially a 10-year one.

The representatives in the store were kind enough, and after doing a few simple troubleshooting steps got on the phone with Apple on my behalf.    After a few minutes of “Ok’s, and uh-huh’s” the phone call was handed off to me personally and the Apple representative provided several options, all of which involved some type of expense to me:

1. Send the phone via courier at my expense to Apple and be without any phone for a week, perhaps a little more while it was fixed.
2. Drive down to Sacramento to switch it out again, if they found it defective.
3. Pay them $599 and have a new 3GS, sending the original back and getting a refund only if Apple determined the phone was indeed faulty.

Already a bit frustrated with the degraded quality control at Apple, as well as seeing a stack of new 3GS boxes (and thus a working phone number) behind the counter, I simply asked the Apple rep why I couldn’t replace the phone there at the AT&T store versus driving two hours to Sacramento’s Apple store.   The rep on the phone provided some long convoluted answer with arbitrary excuses of how AT&T and Apple’s relationship worked, and I simply told him none of those options were acceptable.   I then asked the AT&T rep if I could simply swap the iPhone for something much cheaper, reliable and at least functional one, so I could have a working number.    Apple’s and AT&T’s only option to resolved the issue in that manner without incurring early termination fees would be to wait until the end of my contract on May 16th.

At this point I’m nearly livid:  I had just paid my monthly wireless bill of over $100,  and certainly many thousands of dollars over the span of my patronage with AT&T.    I’m in the store being told that my account, which is completely paid up, is useless unless I fork out even more money, or wait literally 19 more days for my contract to expire.  No budging from either AT&T’s or Apple’s position.

Well, that’s all it took.   I refuse to be subservient to a company I’m sending money to.  That’s not how it works in my book.   I do not run my business that way, and I expect the same courtesy out of the businesses I use.  I thanked the representatives on both the phone and behind the counter for their time, and explained that both Apple and AT&T had lost a long-time customer over some silly arbitrary agreements between the two of them that really only existed to inconvenience their customer.

Verizon, here I come.