Welcome to my inaugural posterous post. 

I decided to make the switch to AT&T mostly because of the hardware provided by Apple.  In a world of Incredibles, Droids and EVOs mobile hardware is advancing at a cheetah's pace.  When Gizmodo broke the iPhone 4 leak a couple months ago, the iPhone started to look viable for me.  Without even knowing the internal hardware, the design caught my eye more than any other iPhone to date.  Glass on front and back, the metal rim, the individual volume buttons.  It was something that was an iPhone but it wasn't.

Fast forward to pre-order day.  We all know what happened during the WWDC keynote so I won't rehash.  Starting early this morning on AT&T's website the pre-order process would hit different milestones and error out.  Our situation was more complex as we were porting in 2 numbers from Verizon on a new AT&T family plan.  Regardless, after a few failed attempts I gave up and went to the local AT&T store.

While there were a fair amount of people in the store, it wasn't overrun or shut down as earlier Internet reports stated.  The representative taking my order was friendly and all, but really didn't inform me exactly what was going on during each step.  Because of this, he ported my number instead of Karen's to the 16GB 3GS that she bought today.  This lead to an hour long call with AT&T and Verizon's provisioning groups to get my number back in Big Red's hands and off AT&T's network so I can continue to have service until my new iPhone 4 comes in.

Both parties were extremely nice and helpful.  The Verizon guy even gave the AT&T guy some guff over the new data plan set up and tried to tout the Incredible, which I felt was a bit unprofessional, but allowed a comedic break to the monotonous waiting.  When all was said and done, I got my number back, we walked away missing 2 hours of our life but got free activation on both phones.

Clearly AT&T was not prepared for the volume, either that or the volume was so high that it broke everything.  Being that they are already pushing back the delivery for my pre-order (to June 25-July 5), it's apparent no amount of preparation could have saved today's online disaster.  The store's computer system was spotty at best, ending up at the end of our visit being completely down and unable to process Karen's port.  Our representative called us back and set up the port once their systems came back up nearly 2 hours after we left the store.

Overall AT&T was very helpful on the customer service side, though it's frustrating to know that one simple question (Which number?) could've saved us an hour and a potential billing nightmare with Verizon.  I understand that this was likely his 130891374135780th order today but still, it's the simple things that can save all the time in the world.