I got a phone 0.0 pixel 8a I got it locked, and it kicked around for some time.
I took it to the provider and they said it said the imei wasn’t compatible and they didn’t know what to do. Took it to another store, same thing. One store sorted it out eventually, they’d seen it before … the solution was sketchy but officially recognized I was told I could set up a my verizon account and call support to unlock it. I dialed the number and was forwarded to a chat agent and hung up on. It took me a long time to realize that I could not get on-device support as-is because I did not have a data plan — even though the phone, without data, had loaded other things over data (recorded in my account history). The support line behaved strangely, frequently hanging up on me, sometimes forwarding me to menus I had not requested. I eventually got the chat to load on another device. Depending on how things would go, it would give me two different engagement stories. In one, it would say it was forwarding me to a live agent and then wait forever. In another, it would tell me i needed to make a my verizon account, and ask for my consent to do so, and then say it encountered an error and couldn’t proceed. I eventually went to the website and made a my verizon account. However, when I tried to associate my phone number, it said I could not do so. I eventually figured out I had to tell the robot on the phone, when it asked me to state what I needed, that I needed to talk to an agent. When I did that, all my browser tabs closed on my other device. They are still nowhere to be seen. I asked the human I finally reached to help me register for my verizon. We registered together but after going through the forms the website said it encountered an internal error instead of logging me in. The agent hadn’t seen that before. They did something on their end, and I tried again in a clean session with different credentials. Finally, I got registered and logged in. After trying to sell me an upgrade, the agent said my phone would automatically unlock after 2 months. I was told in-store it would take 3 months.
