But they did call, talk to someone, and get it fixed. The hitch was that the first person they called was unfamiliar with the issue and had to escalate it.

I don’t see how that happened in this case. They were able to talk to someone and get it fixed.

The blog post was written NINE days after their first contact with apple support. "They were able to talk to someone and get it fixed" yes, after at least nine days of being locked out. This was all triggered by being 15 days late on a payment, because APPLE screwed up and didn't send a trade-in kit.

If you're ok with being treated that way, that's fine - I'm not.

Based on this post, I doubt Apple failed to send a trade in kit.

Trade in kits have in the past come from a third party; that’s unrelated to the person having a bank account number on file for recurring charges that’s invalid, and having not seen the email traffic explaining such.

Why would you accuse them of lying? If the author wanted to lie why would they include their mistakes like missing the email?

Either way, it doesn't actually matter - even if it's 100% the author's fault, NINE days to get to a human who can resolve the issue is enough of a reason to avoid having too many of your services centralized with apple.

Doesn't have to be lying - just dumb errors. They probably got the box and didn't know what it was and threw it out by accident. It's easy enough to do.

Given the entire post is them making dumb errors and then blaming others it would be in line with the rest of it.

the author says the phone / imessage kept working fine, just unpaid cloud services froze.

sounds like the apple support person never thought to ask or check if they had unpaid bills for those frozen services. (facepalm)

> sounds like the apple support person never thought to ask or check if they had unpaid bills for those frozen services.

Yeah, that was a little surprising to me too. One would imagine that ones iCloud or Apple account would have everything in one place on Apple's side. The support person should have been able to pull up the account and see some reference number related to the incomplete trade-in, the bounced payment, and some status message about the account being auto-locked due to missing payment.

If the support person saw a normal, unaffected account - that makes me think visibility into the account is restricted into support tiers and the person should had the ability to escalate or request (logged) access to more details. It's a shame it took the author multiple days and calls into different departments to find resolution for what should have been a very obvious payment problem.