Last Friday the newest iPhone, the 6s, came out. I knew I was up for an upgrade and was thinking about getting one. Yesterday I decided as a nice birthday present to myself, I would pull the trigger and go get one.
I loaded up the kids after Jack got out from school and headed up to the mall. I walked into the AT&T store and was asked if I needed help. I told them that I wanted to get the 6s. They asked me which one I wanted and I told them just the regular 6s, not the Plus, Space Gray (black), and 128gb. They checked my account to make sure I was eligible for an upgrade (I had already checked that before leaving the house) and when they said that I was they headed into the back to get my phone. About 10 minutes later they came out from the back. I though it was odd that it took so long to get my phone, and I was even more puzzled that they didn’t have a phone in their hands. The guy sat down with his iPad and sighed heavily. “We have a problem” he said. Knowing that my account was 100% solid since I haven’t missed or even been late with a payment for 6 years I’ve had an account with them I asked what the problem was. Apparently when I got my phone upgraded to the 5s 2 years ago, the guy who did it made a mistake. He gave me my phone, activated it, but never actually put into the system as a sale. I hadn’t paid a single cent for my phone in the last 2 years. In essence, I had gotten a $750 iPhone for free. This would be cool except for the fact that since my phone order for my 5s was still showing as ‘pending’ rather than processed, I could not trade in my phone for credit towards the 6s. Basically in their system my plan was up for an upgrade by the system wouldn’t allow it since I had never paid on my old phone. The store manager had never seen this before and was uncertain as to what to do. I asked him what my options were and he told me there were really none. When I asked him if that was it and if I was stuck with this phone forever (totally unacceptable), he told me the only thing he could do was call corporate to let them know about to try and fix it, but by doing that they may turn around and try to charge me for the phone I was supposed to pay for. Since I knew that I was never going to pay them for a mistake they had made on their end 2 years ago, I told him to go ahead and call corporate to see what they could do.
About 30 minutes later the manager came out with my new iPhone in hand and told me everything had been taken care of. Corporate had fixed everything on their end and I didn’t have to pay a dime. So they did all the stuff you need to do to upgrade a phone in their systems while I erased my phone for the trade-in. When they calculated my trade-in value, they asked if I needed anything for the phone. While I was waiting for them to fix everything with corporate, I noticed that they had the phone case that I was going to get at my store, which is pretty much the exact case I’ve had on my 5s. Since I was getting free money since I never paid for my 5s, I decided to grab the case there since it was free. I still had a nice balance left over after that so they just applied it to my bill.
So all in all, I walked in there with a 32gb iPhone 5s that I never paid a dime for, and walked out of there with a 128gb iPhone 6s, a new case, and a credit on my bill. Not too shabby at all. However, I don’t think something like this is likely to ever happen to me again. But for now, I will relish in this small victory.
