I’ve been playing news item avoidance all day on the iPhone / AT&T / NYC story all day.  In case you somehow missed it, here’s what happened:

Someone discovered that you can no longer buy the iPhone on the AT&T website if you live in New York City.  Fake Steve Jobs and others widely publicized the fact that this was due to network capacity issues, although AT&T later revised their statement to say that it was due to fraud issues on the website.

I made mention, several times, on Twitter and Friendfeed that I just couldn’t bring myself to care about this topic. I couldn’t put my finger on it, although after responding to the question “Why?” about a half-dozen times, I think I’ve put my finger on it.

I’ve used just about every wireless provider in existence at one point or another.  When I was in highschool, I was probably the only kid who had a mobile phone in his car (back when they were hard wired to your car), and it was an AT&T phone (or the company that is now, through a convoluted sequence of mergers and acquisitions, AT&T). My parents, inexplicably, bought some sort of five year contract with AT&T, and for quite some time I saw how every minor change to the account brought another year’s worth of mandated service to the contract, and how the bill somehow always went up, instead of down or remaning the same.

At some point in the middle part of this decade, one of the companies I worked for bought a company AT&T contract, which of course ended in a voice-overage tragedy.

I’ve watched others, like iJustine, get sent twenty pound AT&T phonebills for what is essentially normal usage for a power-tech user. I’ve polled my friends on their average iPhone bill (it’s generally north of $115 a month or so).

In essence, when the iPhone came out, there was such a history of AT&T deception and idiocy in my life that I knew I’d never be an iPhone user (so long as it was on the AT&T network).

Hence, My Fatigue Comes from Being Right Early

As a result, I think my lack of sympathy for NYC iPhone user-hopefuls comes from their lack of research on AT&T, and my overabundance of research.  The only positive experience I’ve ever had with AT&T is with their UVerse service, and UVerse users definitely don’t constitute a mainstream in America.

Heck, if you do an image search for AT&T in Google, the first few results are far from flattering:

As Minimage said on a related Friendfeed thread earlier today, “There was that one article that said AT&T was awesome and that the iPhone was the problem,” but aside from that, I don’t think you can honestly say that AT&T gets a lot of good press.

So is the iPhone reality distortion field truly that great?  People will buy a great product knowing full well they’ll become tethered to a horrible service package for a year, two, or maybe more willingly? And they’ll even complain (loudly!) that they can’t be forced into subservience to the mighty blue sphere for a while?

That’s the world we live in?  The mind boggles.

Incidentally, to the best of my knowledge, you can still by an iPod Touch in New York City.  Just sayin’.

Update: By the time I finished tapping this out, AT&T started selling iPhones in NYC again. Crisis averted.