CRAP PHONE

(aka: The cell phone that makes you insane.)

I have recently decided that there are not enough swear words in the English language (press dos para espanol) to describe how much I hate my semi-new Tracfone.

Last month it just quit working…shut down with 16 minutes of quality conversation left. No amount of charging would help. Thinking perhaps I was wrong about having time remaining on it, I went online and purchased 60 more minutes for $19.95. Stupid move. The phone remained dead.

So, it was off to the 1-800 service number. After being on the line with Ramon for an hour, still nothing, so his stumped supervisor told him to send me a replacement phone. I’d keep the same number and 76 minutes would be transferred to it. Okay. Problem solved. So I thought.

The replacement phone arrived within a few days but, of course, I’d have to call back the service folks to get it “activated.” According to the cheery chick on the Tracfone recording, this process would be “quick and easy.” Yeah, about as quick and easy as lancing a boil on my butt. You get the picture?

It took four calls over the course of three days, totaling 3-½ hours, to get activated. I lost track of how many times I was put on hold by Manual, Cyril, Martha, and Anthony. But I’ll give ol’ Anthony credit. He finally got me up and running, even though he had to give me a new number.

The goofy end to this story is that in the course of Cyril dinking around with trying to change the existing phone number to the replacement phone, the old phone magically came back to life! It still has the 16 minutes left on it, but I’m returning it to the Tracfone Headquarters, as I’ve been directed to do. They can jam those minutes through the Customer Service Manager’s headset, for all I care--as long as the process is not “quick and easy.”