[AT&T Samsung Galaxy Note II] T.J. Bender:
I can appreciate what you're saying, but there are sometimes legitimate reasons to be annoyed. Take my case, for example. I took Friday off so I could be home when the phone arrives--not getting onto a plane--and avoid having a neighborhood kid see a box on my porch, see that it's from AT&T and run off with it. I pushed that trip back to Tuesday of next week (by taking the day off Friday), confident that AT&T would ship on the 6th and I'd be in good shape.

Then yesterday, I first spoke with an online rep who said that my order would ship on the 8th. That would've made my day off (which I only get so many of) a complete waste, so I called AT&T, and the rep on the phone said the Note 2 had a backorder of 6,000 units, and it would ship on the 9th. I was fine with the phone arriving on Monday, then I realized that Monday is a national holiday, so the phone wouldn't be delivered until Tuesday afternoon--long after I'd boarded my 8:00 AM flight. Since my wife is leaving town to visit family next week while I'm gone, the package would have sat on my doorstep, potentially for days, while I was off on the exact business trip that I wanted it in hand for. I called AT&T again, and spoke to a third rep who said that there was no backorder, and all units were shipping today. I told him of my confusion and asked to speak to a supervisor to straighten things out. Sat on the phone for half an hour, then talked to a supervisor who couldn't have been less interested in what I had to say, had no explanation for why no one knew what the shipping date was, and insisted that he couldn't give me a "guaranteed delivery date" when I wasn't asking for one in the first place. He also said that if I wanted my phone on Friday, I'd have to cancel my current order because it had an upgrade attached to it (then literally laughed at me when I told him that the phone is not an upgrade--I'm paying full price for it) and go to an AT&T store, where they may or may not have inventory. Based on what he told me, call center reps are programmed to pull stuff out of their keyster, and supervisors are programmed to disavow all knowledge and argue semantics with the consumer rather than explain or assist with anything. When I asked for his name and ID number so I could pass my experience with him along to his higher-ups who should be calling me within the next day or so, he again laughed at me and said he was sorry he couldn't help me by giving me a guaranteed delivery date, once again missing the point. I wasn't asking for a guaranteed delivery date, I was asking for a shipping date so I could plan accordingly in regards to going to an AT&T store or not, and failing that, asking why three of his reps gave me three different answers, and his answer was, "No one here knows anything."

At the end of the day, yeah, my phone will almost certainly arrive tomorrow, so I'm happy in that regard. I'm not happy that I had to run around in circles and be laughed at by a supervisor before figuring it out for myself, and I'm going to be really unhappy if AT&T resets the "upgrade" timer on my account because I paid full-price for a new phone. Are there a lot of people in this thread who are whining because their phone didn't ship on the 6th and arrive on the 7th? Yeah. But I'm also seeing lots of people who took the 9th off, as well as my own situation, and were left completely in the dark because some VP decided that he was going to arbitrarily delay shipment to those who'd pre-ordered so that stores would have it first (I thought that was the point of pre-ordering?), and left many of us scratching our heads, if not worried that we'd wasted a day off and would have the phone sitting out front all day (or longer).