Birthday parties are a wonderful thing.....especially if they are celebrating the beginning of a new decade. Not only do you get to see all the members of your family, but many of your closest friends show up. And a few even bring presents.

At my most recent birhday party my ex gave me a fantastic gift....the new Apple iPhone. What a beauty!! I couldn't believe how far I had come in the last five years. In 2002 I bought my first cell phone ever...a Motorola starTAC. I kept that phone until a couple of months ago when I was finally embarrassed into buying a new model. I rarely saw anyone on the street who had a clamshell mobile phone with an antenna that one had to raise and lower manually. One person once complemented me on it, and he said it was "so retro". However, my kids and my friends begged me to get something else. Finally I did. I bought the Motorola Q (or Moto Q for short) and thought I was one cool dude.

I was very happy with my new cell phone. It was much sleeker than the old bulky starTAC. Then along comes Apple's new iPhone and everyone is talking about it. You would have to be living underwater not to know about it. And bingo I get one for a birthday present. Now I am not one to look a gift horse in the mouth, but I am still one to look at expenses. Since I already have a new cell phone that works fine I'm not convinced that I should pay monthly fees for another one. But the problem is that my cell phone service is limited to domestic calls. And since I am leaving shortly for Europe I finally decided to hook up the iPhone as it also works internationally.

This is where the fun begins. I read the brochure that came with the cell phone and am told the only way I can get service is hook it up to iTunes. Fine and dandy, but how do you do that. Fortunately I was at a dinner the other night with several thirty something techies and I noticed that they all had iPhones. But so did a friend who was studying at Harvard Business School. I asked him if he could help me, and he came over to my place and plugged in the iPhone to my PC meanwhile chastising me for not having an Apple computer. He downloaded iTunes and then I proceeded to fill out a few forms in order to get AT&T service. As everyone is also aware you can only use AT&T with your new iPhone. I presently use another phone company for my Moto Q, and am quite happy with their service. In fact I even bought their stock I liked the company so much. But I don't have any choice because AT&T has a monopoly if you want iPhone service. We will come back to that in a moment.

I check the first box for 450 minutes (I don't need more because I will soon have two cell phone plans) for $59.99 and I click "continue". Next I enter my email address, and my new password. I now have a couple of dozen passwords for different groups and it is getting impossible to remember them all. Some people say use the same password but that doesn't make sense because if someone figures it out they have access to all your accounts. Then I fill in my birthdate as if that is vital information for opening an account. However they say they need it because "you must be at least 18 years old" to open an account. Why don't they just have a box that says "over 18?" It would save a few extra seconds of typing. Plus does everyone need to know our age?

The next page asks for my name (no problem), billing address (no problem until the computer responds that it won't accept a P.O. Box which is where I get my bills sent....I can't go on until I give a street address), home phone (I can live with that, but what if I didn't have a home phone like most people under 30?) And then they ask the mother of all questions....what is your social security number? My Social Security number??? Why in the world does AT&T need my SS#? Are they a bank that reports interest payments to the IRS? Are they my employer that reports my earnings to the IRS? No not even close.

So I click on "Why do we need this?" right after the empty SS# box which I will not fill in. It says

"Your Social Security Number is required by AT&T. By providing your Social Security Number, you give credit check consent and reporting authorization as follows: I authorize any person, or consumer or credit reporting agency to provide any information it has on me or the entity on whose behalf I make this application. I authorize AT&T to: *Compile this information *Disclose my account information including my payment history and confidential information to credit reporting agencies or private credit reporting associations *Periodically obtain and use my credit report and other credit information from any source in connection with AT&T's offering of wireless and other services. I understand that if I fail to fulfill the terms of my credit obligations under the Agreement, AT&T may report my failure to a credit reporting agency. To learn more about how your personal information is used and securely stored, read AT&T's Privacy Policy."

That was singularly uninformative.

After I leave the SS# box blank, the next entry is for my credit card information for iTunes purchases. I don't know why this is on the AT&T form but I fill it out even though I don't ever plan to purchase anything from iTunes. (It must be obvious by now that I didn't just celebrate my 30th or even 40th birthday.)

So then I click "continue" but it won't let me continue until I fill in the SS# information which I won't do because I have read enough about identity theft to know that this is not a good idea. Also somewhere in the back of my mind I recall being told by lawyers that you don't have to give your SS# for most things including getting access to the air waves which the public owns. When I got cable TV service for my home I didn't have to give it. It seems an unwarranted invasion of privacy and I don't know why more people don't strenuously object.

So since the computer wouldn't let me complete my application, the following day I went to see a live person at one of AT&T's customer service centers. When I walked into the store there were several sales people standing around. I went up to one and said that I would like to sign up for AT&T service for my new iPhone. I was told that he couldn't do that because they didn't have an internet connection, and I needed to go on the internet to get service. (AT&T doesn't have internet service at that store...go figure.) I told him I had already been on the internet, but that I didn't want to give my SS# to AT&T. He said he couldn't help me.

So I went back to my office and called AT&T's toll free number and I explained my situation to the nice woman on the other end of the phone. She completely understood my concern, and she said that if I were willing to provide a $1000 deposit then I wouldn't have to give my entire SS#, but only the last four digits of it. With great relief I thanked her and said that I would be glad to provide her with my credit card info for the deposit. Then she told me that she couldn't help me because I would need to visit a customer service center to take the required information. Once there they would be able to provide me with an AT&T pre-approved credit check code which I could enter on my computer in a box on the page with th e infamous SS# request. As AT&T explains it: "With an AT&T Pre-Approved Credit Check Code, AT&T will activate your iPhone service without performing another credit check during iPhone activation."

Hallelujah....I just struck pay dirt!! Or so I thought.

So off I go to another AT&T customer service center which miraculously has internet service. So I tell the nice gentleman what the nice lady on the phone had told me and his brow furls. He says that he would have to have my full SS# in order to give me a pre-approved credit check code. But I told him that I had asked the person on the AT&T toll free line twice to repeat the fact that I would only need to provide the last four digits of my SS#, and she had assured me twice that that would be all I needed. And I was ready to provide a $1000 deposit in order to get service (which now that I think about it is just a little outrageous but, hey, I wanted to join all my cool friends who had this hip iPhone...lol).

After further discussion for several minutes, I finally realized that I had hit the proverbial brick wall.....and AT&T had "won" a pyrrhic victory. In the good old days when I was younger I wouldn't have quit. I would have called a vice president of the company to inform them of how stupid this policy was, or that they should get their act together and have all their people talking from the same script. And when I was even younger I would have gone all the way to the top and tried to reach the president of AT&T. But life is too short, and we now have the internet and blogs to vent our frustration in cyberspace. Maybe someone from AT&T will actually see this blog and reach out to me.