Today, the iPhone goes on sale from T-Mobile, which is something that many of our readers are very excited about. After years of being with the only major carrier without the phone, who can blame them? While people who line up in stores today will walk away cradling the precious, precious phone in their hands, some people who got a jump on ordering will have to wait for a while.

13-year T-Mo customer Renae shared her story. She encountered the same problem as reader Richard: the system wouldn’t let her order a phone because she was already a customer. Now, somehow, she’s been charged for two and her phone isn’t supposed to show up until the 17th.

She writes:

[I had] the idea to just order the iphone as a new customer then once I get it I’ll call to cancel my old line. I’ll lose my history but whatever I want this phone. I place the order online, everything is fine until the very end. Then I get a message saying there has been an error, my order has been cancelled and I need to call. So I call. The rep says I am a new customer so I have to get a credit check. I explain my situation to him and he’s cool with it he just directs to me to another extension so they can bypass the credit check. I wait on hold for 15 minutes then realize no one is going to help so I hang up.

By now it’s about 12:00 pm. Now I’m not sure if the pre-sale actually did end at 3 but per my chat with the T-mobile rep I thought it did. So now I was considering changing providers but I really wanted to give them a chance because I had been with them for so long. At 2:30 I give it one last shot. Upgrading still won’t work so I try to add the iphone as a new line on my account and it works! Finally! They email me the agreement! Yes! Oh and at 2:45 pm, 15 minutes before the pre-sale was supposed to end I get an email notification saying “oh hey, you can pre-order your new phone now”. Gee thanks T-Mobile.

Then they charged me twice.

And then both charges dropped off of my account so I don’t know when they are planning on actually charging me.

Then I get an email saying I should receive my phone on 4/11 but when I check the UPS tracking info it says it won’t actually be here until 4/17. So I’m still waiting. Was it worth it? No. But I was already so far into it that I just wanted it to be over.

Being new to this phone iPhone thing, maybe T-Mobile just doesn’t understand the semi-religious fervor of the device’s fans, who simply must have the device on the day it launches if they’ve ordered ahead of time. This demand is easy to make fun of, but why allow preorders if you’re not going to ship them early enough?

Reader Andrew, another longtime T-Mobile customer, was excited to order iPhones for himself and for his wife. He wrangled free overnight shipping from the company, but couldn’t actually get his phones to ship overnight. He, too, will have to mope around without an iPhone until next week.

[I] was confused as to why I couldn’t upgrade both lines. I was never asked about shipping options and when I got the confirmation email for the first number it said: “standard ground shipping” with an estimated arrival date of 4/15. I called to change the shipping method within five minutes and was told that there was nothing that could be done to change the shipping method, even though the phone wouldn’t ship out for five days. I was even more disappointed to find that I couldn’t cancel the order and place a new one either.

After over an hour on the phone with Tmobile, I decided that i was going to have to live with getting the phone late. I went ahead and placed the order for my wife’s phone with the overnight shipping so at least she could have it on launch day. I received a confirmation email (not the one you have to sign electronically, the actual confirmation. I even called in later that day to confirm that I had indeed ordered everything correctly and that both phones would be shipped.

On Wednesday I had been debited for one phone, but not the other. I went online to check out the order status and saw that the second order I had placed said cancelled. I called in and was told it was because i didn’t sign the EIP within 8 hours. I told them that I was assured that I had and the CSR looked into it more and said that indeed I had signed both EIP agreements. They told me that one order was prepared to ship and the other one was in process. They said that my order showing cancelled was just a glitch.

The next day (thurs) i received an email that my order had shipped, so I went to mytmobile and saw that one had shipped and the other was still saying cancelled. So once again I called and they said that my order had cancelled, but they could not see any reason why. I then had the choice of reordering or just going to the store on Friday. I opted to order with overnight so that by the time it processed and shipped both phones would arrive within a day of each other.

So here I sit, a loyal customer to Tmobile for 6 years who stuck around and waited, hoping that one day the iphone would work. I was tempted to leave so many times because of the iphone alone. But i stuck around and built loyalty to a company that had treated me well in the past.

When I first heard that the iPhone was coming to Tmobile I was ecstatic. Even if the Full price meant ordering a 16gb for both of us rather that 32 or 64. Now I get to watch new customers buy their phones and play with them for nearly a week before I get mine. What was the point of preordering if they don’t arrive at my house on launch day?

The point should be to save you the trip to a physical T-Mobile or Apple Store when you presumably have a life, and also to make sure you have a phone reserved for yourself in case they sell out before lunch time. “Make sure loyal customers who order early have to wait until the middle of next week” isn’t supposed to be on that list.

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