So I took the phone in this afternoon and explained what was going on. The employee apologized and said she'll look into finding who I talked to last night because he gave me completely false information.
She scanned the barcode in the phone and confirmed it has a good ESN and that the ESN was registered to the number. She told me that the over the air programming just didn't take (and she said that it happens from time to time), but last night they should have walked me through manually programming the phone and not blown me off.
I was there for a total of maybe 5 minutes. In, out, and done.