Well, isn’t technology marvelous? On Tuesday, my new super-duper iPhone 17 Pro Max Cosmic Orange colored slab arrived. It came even earlier than expected. I was so pleased with it. So, you can imagine my joy, when yesterday, a second one arrived. Where were you in October? As it turned out, I did order two phones. First through the app on 11/17. But a week later, 11/23, when I went into check on this order, it had mysteriously disappeared. I trooped down to the AT&T store for a visit. An afternoon later, after my old iPhone 12 was first dropped from service but later restored and I had to show my ID a dozen times (I kid you not.), I left with a new order for a seventeen. That was Tuesday’s phone. Yesterday’s delivery was the first one ordered. The one whose order I was assured had been cancelled.

So, you can imagine my reluctance to just hand over this second phone, still in its unsealed box, without so much as a howdy-doody. I asked for a receipt, as guard against the inevitable double billing fiasco yet to come. I was told that I could not have a receipt, because this phone was not in their system. I even pulled up the AT&T app and showed them the two deliveries. At this point, I went full Karen and asked to speak to a manager. An hour later, he came out.

An hour that I had to sit listening to a podcast that the old lady at the next table was listening to. When I asked her what she was listening to, she said it was about aliens, not the illegal kind but the space kind. Then she proceeded to tell me all about it, until I stopped her. She said that her friends think that she is nuts.

By then the manager arrived. I repeated my long sad story, and he repeated the statement that this phone did not exist, even though he was holding it in his hand at the time. I eventually settled for an email from the manager as some proof that I had returned this second phone, but I fully expect more trouble to come.