Back around Thanksgiving my wife and I made the jump from US Cellular to Verizon, for the express purpose of getting iPhones. And I’ve gotta say, as a first-time iPhone owner: the iPhone 5 is fantastic. The hardware is exemplary. Everything happens quickly, the Apple software is (mostly) beautiful and (almost always) consistent, and the battery life… well, the battery life is almost unbelievable after my two years as a Galaxy S owner.

Over the past couple of weeks, though, we’ve noticed some issues with my wife’s telephone. Mine works just fine, but if you try to call her, about 90% of the time it’ll ring twice on your end and go straight to voice mail. She never even gets an indication that someone is trying to call. She can be in the same room as me, with good signal, etc, but while calls to me work just fine, calls to her get re-routed. (She gets texts just fine.)

So, I’ve entered the Verizon support hassle. First call to tech support started with 10 minutes on hold. After that a helpful support gal looked into some network settings, tried calling my wife’s phone, and after two consecutive calls got through, declared the phone fixed. Once we hung up I tried calling my wife from my phone and it went straight to VM. Then I tried calling her phone via Google Talk’s free calling service, and that, too, went straight to VM. Four times in a row.

My next attempt has been via @VZWSupport on Twitter. It took about two days to finally get some action from them, but after some short diagnostic questions they now have a new SIM card headed out to us via Fedex. Guess we’ll see if that solves the problem. A Google search for this issue leads me to believe that the new SIM card might just be step 1 in a longer tech-support dance, but seeing as it’s a new year I’ll try to hold out hope for a quicker solution.