Yesterday, while bitching about my experience with AT&T’s 800 # customer service, I asked my boss what he was doing with his Gen 1 iPhone when he bought the new one. “Nothing,” he said, “You want it for like $25?”

Done. The screen is cracked pretty badly and Apple will charge me quite a bit to replace it but the phone works great.

So here’s the outcome of the AT&T customer service: I walked into my local AT&T store this afternoon (after the iPhone rush) and told the rep I wanted to hook up a used iPhone I’d just purchased from a friend. He told me all I needed to do was drop a blank SIM card into the phone, attach it to my Mac, fire up iTunes and iTunes would guide me through the setup. He handed me the blank SIM card.

I’ve never been an iTunes user but I opened it with the phone connected. iTunes prompted me to create a new account, asked me information about my AT&T account and walked me through the setup very easily. Now I’m waiting for the iPhone to update to the 2.0 software. Supposedly, the phone will let me know when it is active and working though I’ve already received an email telling me that “AT&T has successfully activated your iPhone service.”

So, for all the annoyance of Wednesday’s encounter with AT&T, today worked like a charm. So far. If the phone doesn’t work soon, I will change my tune since my old phone is already kaput.