So I finally did what every responsible WoW player is supposed to do now that I'm playing more regularly again, and attached an authenticator to my account via my iPhone.

I will now get to spend the next several days (most likely) trying to restore access to my account, after a series of what I would consider to be normal events that has resulted in being completely locked out of my account.

First and foremost, my iPhone died.  It had been giving warnings for a bit, saying there was no SIM card installed (even though there was).  This phone was brand new (less than a month old), so I wasn't expecting it to crap out on me, but it became completely nonfunctional last night. 

Today I took it into an Apple store and they told me it was too far gone and just gave me a new one.

Those of you who have an iPhone authenticator probably already know where this is headed...but I'll just say that when I got home and tried to do a restore on my phone, only to have Blizzard tell me it didn't like my information, I got a little irritated.  After further researching into the issue, I see that I'm likely going to have to make few calls and wait on hold for a ridiculous amount of time.  Annoying enough as it is.  But what I'm much more frustrated about is that because my phone died w/o me having a chance to retrieve the old serial number attached to the authenticator, I'm probably going to be asked to jump through several more hoops, delaying access to my account several days if not a week or more. 

Again, you're probably thinking to yourself, well why didn't you write it down or store it somewhere safe?  Well, I did.  And unfortunately kiddo has gone into a paper & cardboard destroying phase, and nothing is sacred (particularly notepads and books).  Code has since been destroyed.

I'm not saying authenticators are a bad thing, but I am not thrilled at all about the time and effort I am going to have to make to resolve this.  I really wish they would just keep the serial number tied with the app somehow so that when you restore your iPhone, it keeps the same serial number as before.  Just saying...