Life as Crisis Management: The TracFone Kiada...

As all of you out there in reality land know, dealing with bureaucracies of any type, economic, governmental, educational, or cultural, can be a Kafkaesque experience and a Voinovichian challenge. I seem to get these Kafkaesque or Voinovichian challenges several times a year. Some backstory first: I get cell phone service from TracFone. Unfortunately, I have had problems with this company almost since I got their one-year plan several years ago. Recently, I had occasion to contact the TracFone corporation about several problems I was having with TracFone and to get to responses to several problems I was having with the company.

Here were my questions. Question: When will the log in to the TracFone website work consistently? I have tried to log in four times in the last two months and each time I been met with a website that malfunctions when I can actually get in it, which is only occasionally? Answer: We are working on it. Question: When I can actually get into my TracFone account online there are no minutes listed in my account. The only thing I find in my account is my phone number under “Devices Active” and my data minutes. As I don't have any data minutes, I don't need to know how many data minutes I don't have because I already know that I don't have any. Now that is absurdist, Kafkaesque, and Voinovichian ain't it? Answer: Silence. Question: Why do I not have my total minutes listed on my flip phone? I had to switch to a flip phone because of my arthritis and had to have the minutes moved over to the new phone from the old. On my old phone the minutes I had appeared on the time/date/signal etc. page. Answer: In a 25 March telephone conversation I was finally told that now I have a smart phone and smart phones don't list the minutes you have. TracFone could have simply told me this answer to this query via an email or via Facebook. Question: Do I pay for these calls for help to TracFone? Answer: A rousing vampire capitalist yes. Skank and slag capitalists like TracFone appear to want to have their cake and eat it to leaving the customer with not even any crumbs in the process.

I was given the gift of a telephone conversation with an actual TracFone representative once on 25 March. Here is what happened: The customer service operative told me to log in to my account on the TracFone website. After I logged in the rep asked me for my userID. I gave it to him. Then the information that was there, including my phone number and my data minutes, the data minutes that are none, suddenly vanished like a Soviet commissar living in the age of Stalin. Initially there was no change in the status of my website after this encounter. That changed, however, at 6 pm, 25 March when I was suddenly and almost magically able to log into my account. Once I got there, however, there was still no information about how many minutes of telephone talking time I have on my phone. By 9 pm on the same day, I couldn’t get in my account once again. I can hear you moan as I type dear Franz and Vladimir!

The TracFone representative did offer alternatives both of which I was already familiar with and both of which were not really viable options for me. First, he informed me that I could text for information about my minutes something physically impossible for me to do because of muscular skeletal arthritis. That is why I use the computer and try to use the online if awful TracFone website to get into my account. My computer keyboard, after all, is bigger than that of a smart flip phone. Second, he informed me that I could do the app thing. Again, as I told him earlier, I can’t do that given the small keyboard size of the flip phone. I use the flip phone exclusively to call people and it suits that purpose well, much better than the micro phone TracFone sent me after they upgraded everyone to 4G.

I can't end this post without briefly commenting on the TracFone telephone help line. One of the things you get when you call for help is the formulaic clear your browser history canned message. I have my browser, Firefox, set on automatic clearing or cleansing of all my online history when it is closes so this cliched response was irrelevant in my case. Better yet, once when I requested a call back from TracFone I got an automated “person” who told me I had to wait for the next available operator. During one of these callbacks I had to wait for several minutes and then I got a dial tone that rang fifteen times before it was picked up. Finally, a real human TracFone rep actually answered my callback but almost immediately hung up on me. TracFone's callback, needless to say, was not what I expected. I expected an actual human to call me back.

To end this long and tragicomic tale let me note that because of all the problems I have had with TracFone, that company, it seems to me, has broken its contract with me. As a result, I wrote the Attorney General of my state requesting refund for the 6???? or so minutes I still have in my minutes account. I simply have no interest in continuing with a corporation as incompetent as TracFone and prefer to seek a better alternative, which should not, given all the above, be all that difficult to find. Hell, If I wanted to experience Kafkaesque and Voinovichian incompetence and absurdity, I would rather experience it vicariously while reading Kafka’s masterful short stories and books and Voinovich's masterful satires rather than from a company that has taken incompetent Kafkaism and Voinovicheanism without the humour to new dumbed down "heights".