After another hour and twenty six minutes, a Web Order Specialist answered the phone this afternoon. She told me that the phone I ordered had, in fact, been replaced by a different model, which would ship to me in approximately two weeks.

I told her that was completely unacceptable, as was the prospect of my phone service being terminated tomorrow with no replacement phone in hand. Not acceptable, I say again. I offer to go to an AT&T store in Manhattan to pick up a phone my self, but I absolutely refused to agree to stay on hold with the porting group for another three hours to stop them from turning off my old service. I made sure to tell her that it was not with her personally I was angry, but at the fact that over the past three days I have been on hold for over nine hours. Nine. Hours. And while the people I spoke with have been unfailingly courteous, their customer service system was the single worst with which I have ever had the misfortune to deal. Faced with the prospect of no phone service for two weeks, I was going to cancel my order and go with a different company that could handle actually sending phones out to people who order them in good faith. She tried to tell me that the only way to cancel my order would be to wait for the phone to arrive and refuse to accept the delivery, but give her a moment and she would see what she could do. She asked me to hold (of course), and when she came back, brightly announced that she had good news and a FedEx tracking number.

According to FedEx, my phone will be arriving in my office no later than 3 pm tomorrow.

Part of me is surprised that I managed to make it work. I threatened just enough, and maintained my civility without being a complete pushover. And she buckled and figured something out, and my phone was picked up by FedEx no more than three minutes after the termination of our phone call.

I am victorious.