Yesterday while I was doing some errands I dropped my iPhone. I had it in an acrylic case but the impact on the sidewalk still cracked the glass screen pretty bad. The phone worked but I didn’t need any glass in my ears. I had to get a new one.
I set out to buy a replacement. I went to see my carrier at one of their local stores. I asked to buy a replacement. They told me that wasn’t possible. They offered to cancel my contract for $400, sign me up again and change my phone number (that I’ve had for 10 years). Said there was no way they could sell me an iPhone any other way. They claimed it was Apple forcing them to do business like this. Then they offered me other brands of phones.
I talked to 3 people at the store, 2 or 3 more on the phone and all of them had this same crap story. They called the Apple Store in Toronto and they said they don’t do repairs. You’d think I was the first person in Canada to have a broken iPhone.
All this non-sense pissed me off. I end up firing off an email to Steve Jobs with an email address I found from Google. I told him what had happened and that in my opinion his company/partners sucked. I called them out on screwing me over and told him it would never happen again.
A few minutes later he replied saying that I indeed I could buy a new iPhone and that I was given the wrong information. He CC’d the COO, Tim Cook too.
Inspired by Steve, I tried my carrier again. I called up one of their call centers and kept escalting. After an hour I finally found a manager who would let me purchase a replacement iPhone without all the extra fees and weirdness. They did push my contract date up though, so it started over again yesterday. They are mailing the new phone to me and said I would have it by the latest Nov 13th.
Later on that night I heard from the director of iPhone support at Apple. He offered to help me deal with my carrier if they were still giving me problems.
Seems the stories on the Internet are true. Steve does read/respond to emails from random customers.
