VZW - lost or stolen (not!)

[juliend]

So a guy I work with recently switched to AT&T from VZW. He got his fresh new Iphone and I bought his Droid Eris. No problem, pretty cool phone. So I go to verizonwireless.com, log in, and try to activate the phone. I get a message saying could not complete at this time, try again later. So I call up CS, and the CS rep tells me the phone is on the negative list as "lost or stolen" and I will not be able to ativate until "whoever put it on that list calls to have it removed". So I call up my friend, and he calls CS himself. After about 20 minutes on the phone with them, they tell him that I will not be able to activate the phone until it falls off the billing cycle. Anyone ever run into this before? I've swapped phones with people, traded, activated, etc, and never have I had to wait until the end of a billing cycle to activate a phone.
I'm annoyed. I have to sit on this phone for over a week before I can activate it....
[/rant]