Trade-ins

So, I'm kinda pissed at Verizon Wireless at the moment. Let me tell you a story.

My dad and I are moving away from the family Verizon account - whole thing about my parents getting divorced and my family falling apart but I'll get to that another time. As part of this, he and I are both getting new phones.

Currently, he has a perfectly working XS Max. So, upgrading is more of a want for him. No big deal, I don't pay the bill on his phone so, no problem.

However, my X is actually having issues - I literally cannot use the top half of the screen anymore due to the defect in the launch edition iPhone Xs. Since I can't get it serviced for free, I just want to upgrade.

So, Verizon. If we start two new lines on a new account, he gets $800 off and I get $400 off - as long as the battery isn't damaged or overheating. We both qualify for that, so yay! We're both getting iPhone 14 Pro Maxes.

Actually doing it is the pain. My girlfriend thinks it's so frustrating so that those without patience will give up and just buy the whole thing... too bad I have patience, as well as a stern voice.

So, I go to Verizon's page, add the two phones with their trade-ins, and fill everything out. The cart's now done and ready to go... except not. At various points throughout the process, the website would give off "Unable to process request" - which immediately led to the entire website just breaking. The shopping cart page would be blank with two blank buttons or just say "Let's build your order" with nothing else, or the website's elements would be in the wrong places for zero reason.

I tried with Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. Happened on all these browsers.

So I tried doing one phone at a time - my dad's 14 Pro Max. I was able to get past the vague error that broke the website, and create the account, start the order, etc etc. But then it came time to set up mine.

Verizon had sent an email saying we were ready to go for sign in. So I go to sign in. Invalid request. I put in the security question's answer. Wrong answer. There was even a point where I entered the account email and it threw us a completely different question from the one we had picked.

I took this to my Discord server, where a member has said that I might need to wait a few days before signing in for it to work. Well... Verizon??? Why would you tell me I can sign in if I actually have to wait? Meanwhile, we have his 14 Pro Max on the way and can't manage any of the details without signing in.

Not to mention, iPhone 14 Pro Maxes are backordered at the moment. I wanted to do this as soon as possible so that we could get our phones at the earliest - me specifically because my phone is coming to the point where it's unusable. If this causes my order to be delayed and my X breaks before that, what am I supposed to do?

Sorry, just needed to rant about dumb businesses that are "pushing for the future". If you want to push the future, push a better website. It's definitely a American and probably privileged problem for me to complain about this, but... these kinds of opportunities don't come often for me.

It gets really annoying when big companies try to take advantage of that.