I don't believe a word of it.
Signed up and talking crap the same day.. spam
You know it makes sense.. For me to waste my time presenting a confusing issue to a knowledgable crew of people and then ACTIVELY participating in the thread. Spam indeed.. And what exactly do you propose that I am advertising in all of this?
It couldn't just be that I had no reason to be part of this board before I had such an outlandish issue presented to me, no, that's unheard of.
/sarcasm
I created the thread with a question mark (?) for a reason. I'm merely relaying what I've been told by my friend, who has absolutely no reason to lie and is counting on me to do anything/everything I can to get his phone working again. He wouldn't tell me something that would lead me to believe the problem is out of my hands. The Genius said/did what he did, and now we're at where we're at.
That said, I've been doing some more googling and found out that a fair amount of people have been unable to get service after upgrading to 2.2, which is what the they updated his phone to at the store (2.1>2.2). So it's possible that the Genius took an Apple firmware issue as a jailbreak problem like a lazy, unhelpful oaf. The coincidence of this firmware issue striking simultaneously with the cold, suspicious words from the Genius led me to believe something that I'm no longer confident about.
Sorry for the initial assumption I made based on the information I had at the time, but a firmware problem is seeming much more likely than a blocked IMEI at this point. I figured restoring it twice would have solved an issue like that but apparently Knolly seems to think there is some sort of trick to it. I'm currently still waiting to get ahold of a Mac to use PwnageTool with Knolly's suggestion and hoping for the best.
If anyone else has any suggestion for this issue based on the assumption that it's a firmware problem, I'd appreciate it.
Thanks for your time everyone.