The Codist

I managed to order a nice iPhone 6 a week ago which arrived today. Eager to activate it and try it out I opened Verizon's instructions and immediately said something unpleasant and highly colorful.

Instructions are (1) turn off old iPhone (2) don't turn on new iPhone (3) call them to activate.

Say what? With only two phones how do I call you to activate the new one? Are you folks really that clueless? No online activation? No automatic activation? I need to get another phone just to call you? Your business is worth $206 billion dollars and you can't even activate a phone online in 2014?

Why does Apple spend so much energy building an amazing phone people are willing to stand in line for days for, only to have the clueless wireless company be unable to do the simplest activation of it. I'm really hoping Apple will start their own phone company and put all these folks in the trash can.

Now I have to waste an entire day tomorrow standing in line at some Verizon store so that I could avoid standing in line at an Apple Store today.

I guess I could go find someone in the neighborhood who has a phone I could borrow. So embarrassing. I might have to use an Android phone. Maybe I can find a phone with a dial.

I once interviewed at Verizon FIOS for some OSX job I thought involved coding but it turned out to be nothing more than "managing" people overseas and taking the blame for whatever went wrong. Clearly they need to save a few dollars to pay their CEO 16 million per year; you can't pay that kind of money and spend it on online activation software.

The iPhone 6 is very nice but at the moment it's a pretty paperweight. Maybe someday I can get it to run!

Update: I went to a Verizon store and they helped activate it. The SIM card was DOA so we used the old one. Even they thought activating a new phone by calling a phone number was dumb.