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This morning a fresh batch of technology devices landed at the Apple store. This included the magic trackpad and a slick, energy efficient battery charger. Who can resist?

Plus I had a couple of gift cards around that had small balances and Apple is good about allowing multiple cards on a single order. Well sort of. So everything went well and the order went in this morning. This afternoon, however, the word came there was a problem.

When you order at Apple online they run a $1 pre-authorization for your card to make sure it's good. When they did this with the gift card it's available $7 balance was reduced to $6 so when they tried to run it for $7 later the charge failed. Oy!

This afternoon I got a call from the folks who had spent hours trying to activate the cellular data plan on an iPad. Having called Apple and AT&T didn't help. The frustration level was understandably very high. At the end of the day it boils down to an odd little problem that AT&T never anticipated.

First the interface for activation isn't great at dealing with errors. The cycle would run like this. You enter all the data and submit it. The system doesn't like your physical address and tells you so. When it presents the form with the error it also removes the password you've entered in your last attempt. However it doesn't highlight the password field so you don't know readily it's been removed. Your next submission is rejected for not having a password. Once you fill that in it gets rejected for the address again and around, and around, and around you go.

Having been through things like this in the past I knew immediately what the problem is. Depending on how you look at it the problem is the US Post Office or AT&T's programmers.