Ok, this one is somewhat interesting too. Like the Amazon experience described next, Apple's customer service employees are essentially constrained by algorithms that ultimately don't enable them to provide any kind of useful customer service.
Here's what happened. Like an idiot, I put an iPad in my luggage on a recent flight from Germany to the US. And predictably, it disappeared, along with who knows what else. Years ago I lost some cameras that way on a flight to Egypt, and after a good deal of work, was actually compensated for them. But times have apparently changed.
But that's not even the point. Before reporting the theft to Lufthansa, I wanted to locate the iPad to confirm that it really was still in Germany, and also against any chance that it was still in my possession. So my idea was to do the "find my phone" feature on icloud and see if I could locate her iPad. But the problem is that it was my mother's iPad, and none of us could quite remember her apple ID.
We tried guessing her password two or three times, but recognizing that too many attempts might cause the account to be locked, I looked into the forgot password options. Most of the options required access to your iPhone, which we didn't have, because we had left it in another state. So I opted for a procedure where Apple's instructions indicated that you could in some cases reset your Apple ID password from a trusted friend's phone. Since my mother trusts me, we used my phone.
But at the end of that process, Apple informed me that it was sending a confirmation message to my mother's phone, which, as I've said above, was in another state.
I tried a couple of times and that's what happened each time. As noted above, the website indicates this works "in some cases." But it didn't tell me why it didn't work in my case. Nor did it tell me why, after taking me through the process of attempting to reset the password using MY phone, it sent to confirmation to HER phone, when the whole reason for going through the process of using my "trusted" phone was that we did not have access to her phone.
I then called Apple Customer service. I got through relatively quickly to an African American woman. Yes, I could tell by her voice. She was very nice and seemed competent, and easier to understand than the non-native speakers that many other companies employ, but I'm guessing she was not particularly expert in this process, because I spent an hour with her on the phone, going through the exact same process (trying to reset it using my phone) and failing in exactly the same way. She then told me that there was a way to reset it by providing further identifying information, such as a credit card, and that normally takes a day. She told me Apple would get back to me within a day on that.
And sure enough, Apple sent an email to my mother the next day. I had expected it to come to my email (to which the representative had sent two emails, which included the case number), so when I first called them two days later I thought that they had let me down on that. But the new customer service rep (also an African American woman) said they had in fact sent the email, and it occurred to me to check my mother's email and there it was. Here's what it said:
An account recovery request was made for your Apple ID.
Dear xxxx,
An account recovery request for your Apple ID (evamdkrause@gmail.com) was made from the web near Rockville, MD on September 19, 2021 at 12:39:05 PM EDT. The contact phone number provided was +1 xxxxxxxx.
You will receive a text or a phone call at this number when your account is ready to recover on October 10, 2021 at 12:39:05 PM EDT. For updated status information or to provide additional information to help recover your account, visit https://iforgot.apple.com
If you didn’t make this request or do not recognize the information presented above, you should cancel account recovery immediately to keep your account secure.
Apple Support
So it was going to take a little more than the day that the first customer rep had hypothesized. October 10 was (and still is) 21 days from when I made the request, on Sept. 19.
I expressed astonishment to the new customer service rep that it would take Apple that long to deal with this situation. My mother was in the room with me and I offered to put her on the phone and do whatever it took to prove her identity. But the rep said there was nothing she could do. I tried to get her to explain WHY, in this computer age, Apple needed 21 days to confirm that I was who I said I was and that I was authorized to change my mother's password. But she had clearly had no idea.
I asked to speak to a supervisor, and was passed on to a perfectly nice man named Billy, who said he had been doing this for Apple for a few years, and this is just how the algorithm works sometimes. Nobody knows what it's doing. He guessed that given the length of time it had provided for the reset, that meant that I had probably gotten locked out after guessing the password incorrectly too many times. As above, that's clearly not what happened (I only tried 2 or t3 times, and it didn't lock the account when I did). But he didn't have any other ideas.
I asked him whether Apple itself could figure out where the iPad was -- it seemed to me that somebody at Apple must be able to fairly easily figure out the location of the iPad. He didn't know for sure, but he indicated that it didn't matter -- Apple values the privacy of its customers so much that it would not give that information out until the account had been verified, which would take those 21 days.
So once again, the WRAITH (Wraith-like artificially intelligent transhuman hive; see my other posts on Alt-QAnon for details) has created an environment wherein even if its customer service representatives wanted to be helpful, they couldn't be.
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