The Governmental EZ-Pass Kiada: Life as Bureaucratic Crisis Management

 

Life is too short to have to deal with the invariable and inevitable muck ups of bureaucracies. Unfortunately, however, bureaucracies don't appear to feel the same way.

I have had numerous problems with bureaucracies over my sixty-nine years of life most of them sadly since I retired as readers of this blog should know by now. Signing up online for Medicare wasn't too difficult until it came to light that my chiropractor had not signed off on the insurance company coverage I had for problems resulting from a car accident I had. It took me at least a month to get the doctor to sign off on the insurance company coverage of my treatment so Medicare would pay my outstanding medical bills. You see, Medicare, it seems, assumed, since the insurance coverage was listed in my permanent file, that the insurance company was responsible for my medical coverage. The insurance company bureaucracy, however,  unsurprisingly vehemently disagreed.

There was also the passport, New York driver's licence and title to the car fiasco. In 2018 I bought a used car. Unfortunately, since the passport I had identified me as Ronald Helfrich and my New York driver's licence identified me as Ronald Helfrich Jr. the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles was not going to give me title to a car I purchased with cash. They did not like the massive difference between the names of Ronald Helfricha and Ronald Helfrich Jr. Only after the pleadings of the dealership from which I bought the car did the DMV relent and give me title to my car.

In the meantime, of course, I had to deal with the United States Department of State because they are the governmental bureaucracy that issues US passports. Interestingly when I first got my US passport it said Ronald Gail Helfrich Jr. In a subsequent renewal, however, State allowed me to "change" my name from Ronald Gail Helfrich Jr to Ronald Helfrich, something I should not have been able to do. Needless to say, changing it back required a modern day labour of Hercules that even the post office in person to try to change it back to the original couldn't believe I had to do. Still, after a month or so of wasted hours spent talking to various people within the bureaucracy I was able to get Ronald Gail Helfrich Jr restored to my passport. I was once again bureaucratically consistent across driver's licence and passport.

This was, however, not the end of corporate or governmental bureaucratic muck ups. Yesterday I learned that I now have yet another bureaucratic problem to deal with, this one involving EZ Pass of New York, which began life as an affiliate of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a public agency in New York City, and which involves several state entities including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey and and the New York State Thruway Authority.

Yesterday I went into my online EZ Pass account to make several changes that needed to be done. First, I changed my phone number because I had to get a new phone thanks to the legendary incompetence of Tracfone and after me existing the awful Tracfone stage left right and centre. Then I changed my email since I am doing everything in my power to no longer use anything Google including trying to get nothing sent to gmail account, something virtually impossible to do in the brave new digital age since so much online is tied to one's email. After two attempts at changing both, success. 

Success with EZ Pass turned out to be very short lived for what I could not change on my EZ Pass account was my licence plate number. One of my licence plates, you see, was stolen a year or two back. The police discovered it somehow and gave me a form so I could get new plates at the DMV for no charge. Getting the new plates at the DMV on Central Avenue was easy thanks to the form. However, and this may be the reason for the muck up, I chose to get the most recent version of NY State plates and this meant a new licence plate number. This, in turn, required me to, if delinquently, change my licence plate number on EZ Pass.

Sadly and not surprisingly this turned out to be easier said than done. When I tried to change my plate number in my EZ Pass account I got a no such plate known message despite several attempts of putting in the numbers in various configurations, including the seven digit plate number on the licence plate on my car and on my registration. When I tried to call EZ Pass the wait times were over an hour and I have better things to do than wait for an hour to talk to a customer service worker about dealing with something that I shouldn't have to deal with in the first place.

This was not the only problem I had with my EZ Pass accounts page. They have my name as Ronald Helfrich Sr, my father, rather than Ronald Helfrich Jr (Jnr), me. And guess what? Yup they would not allow me to change that mistake, a mistake that never should have occurred in the first place since my vehicle registration has my name right.

Long and traumatising story short, I am giving up on EZ Pass. I may opt out of the system entirely and return the tag, itself an annoyance since you have return the tag and return it wrapped it in tin foil, something involving more expenditures of time and monies since you have to buy a requisite sized bag to post it in and you have to take a trip to the post office. Alternatively, I could just say fuck it to NY State because I don't want to have to deal for hours on the phone thanks to yet another bureaucratic feck up and spend time and energy mailing the tag back. I am frankly tired of again and again having my life disrupted by bureaucratic bullshit and I do so like to contribute to bureaucratic chaos. To both ends I deleted my credit card infomation from EZ Pass so they can't automatically charge my account. After all, I haven't used the tag on my car to traverse the NY State throughway system since before the pandemic.

It is, to say the least, annoying to have to deal with bureaucratic muckups, something the brave new digital era has made worse thanks to the fact that incorrect information is imputed regularly into online account pages and beyond. I realise that bureaucracies are necessary in a large scale society consisting of millions of people. Still it is a pity that so much of life, including so much of retired life, has to be spent dealing with the crises associated with the bullshite bureaucracies, public and private, spew and spread. And some wonder why so many people hate bureaucracies. The answer to this question is, of course, simple, while bureaucracies do provide a degree of efficiency, including efficiencies in information gathering in large scale societies with large scale bureaucracies such as the US, these large scale societies and their large scale bureaucracies have also grown way too big for their britches making it them impossible for them to really work and function efficiently and effectively anymore since the nations they service have grown way too big. And this, of course, makes it impossible, particularly when you take into account the rise of new online bureaucratic services and all the muckups those entail, for them to function efficiently and effectively any longer. A plague on all their houses.

The Broadview/SEFCU Kiada

 

There is a universal law as ironclad as Murphy's Law. And that law--shall we call it the double-edged sword law??--is that any change in technology makes things easier at the same time that it makes everything harder, much harder, hairpulling harder. That law certainly applies to online shopping, banking, etc., etc., etc.

I have written extensively in previous blogs about what I regard as the worst craperation I have encountered in 69 years of life, the dreadful Tracfone, and the pain in the arse it is to do business with. I have noted similar if not as bad problems with Empire Blue Vision not Anthem Empire Blue Vision. Now I can add Broadview Federal Credit Union (formerly SEFCU) to my shit list.

As I noted in my blog on Tracfone I finally ditched that craporation for the much superior Consumer Cellular because of a variety of headaches including bad customer service, moronic rules of engagement, and a cell phone that no longer works because it split in half. This means I have a new phone and a new phone number since Tracfone would not allow me to port my contacts over without sending a code to a phone that no longer works. Well it turns out that Broadview/SEFCU is as bad.

Today I went to change my phone number on my account and I can't because SEFCU needs to send a code to my old phone number, to a phone, in other words, that no longer works, so I can log in and change it. Catch-22 rides again.

I am sorely tempted to tell Broadview to feck off. That would mean having to change all my set up online payments. Still it might be worth it becasue I increasingly find Broadview if not the worst craperation I have encountered in 69 years of life I find it the second worst craperation after the truly dismal, skanky. and slaggy Tracfone. I also find the merger, the new name, and the new logo awful. See devolution is real. Broadview proves it.

And the Worst Crapitalist Craperation Award Goes To...Tracfone

A good rule of thumb is to remember to beware of missionaries and their close cousins. evangelical crapitalists, bearing false gifts. I should have kept that proverb in mind when I signed up for Tracfone some ten years ago.

I have spoken several times about my problems with Tracfone in previous blogs on this site. The latest occurred earlier this week. Some backstory first, however.

After I complained for the third time to the attorney general of New York State I had the opportunity to drop Tracfone and obtain a full refund in the process. I stupidly decided--I wasn't feeling well and didn't want to pursue the tracfone merry-go-round of emails, calls, and demands for security codes--not to do this. I thought I could hold on until my service expired in March of 2025, a $200 dollar unlimited plan I purchased in Octorber of 2023. Needless to say this was a moronic decision on my part.

It was a moronic decision as I discovered earlier this week. My tracfone flip phone fell out of my arthritic hands onto my carpeted floor and split in half on Tuesday of this week. As a consequence I no longer had a functioning phone. I no longer had a working phone that I could call emergency with, that I could call my doctor on, or which I could call anyone on. So I drove to Walmart and bought a new Tracfone phone, a big one this time, and returned home with it in order to set it up on line. 

This sounds it would be easy but with Tracfone nothing is, as I should know by now, ever easy. Tracfone, you see, required that a security code be sent to my old phone--yes the phone that doesn't work--before they would link the new phone to my existing account. Take a minute to reflect on this surreal and absurd fact. Tracfone would not set up my new phone until I supplied them with a security code from my old phone which no longer worked. Needless to say, the devoluted morons at Tracfone should read Joseph Heller because they have mastered the single entendre of Catch-22.

Giving up the ghost after trying three times to get this crapitalist craperation to send the code to my Facebook account or my email--old or new--an email contained on my Tracfone account page--I contacted Tracfone by Facebook and on Tracfone chat. I reminded them several times that my Tracfone no longer worked and that as a consequence they could not send a security code to my Tracfone phone.They declined to send me a security code in any other way. They refused to accept the SIM and IMEI mumbers of my broken phone as alternatives. As a consequence, I demanded that Tracfone issue me a full refund by the end of the month. Not surprisingly I have not heard a word from them yet. So I contacted the attorney general of New York for the third time, a record that I suspect will not be topped as I have, over the sixty-nine years of my life, encountered a craperation as awful and as incompetent as Tracfone. Finally, I ordered a Consumer Cellular smart phone from Walmart and tomorrow will sign up for their twenty dollar a month package. I suppose I could call Tracfone from my new Consumer Cellular phone but given that Tracfone mandates that their security code go to my Tracfone phone, the phone that does not work, it would not be worth my time or my effort.

Let me end this essay by answering the question posed in the photo above: What is the Worst? The answer to that question is easy to answer. The worst craperation, and is so by a wide margin, is Verizon's Tracfone. Goodbye Crackfone. I am embarrassed I ever knew ye.
 

The Books of My Life: A New History of Australia

 

I have complained about the lack of narrative coherence, the choppiness, the fragmentation, and the ornamentation of so many contemporary college and university introductory textbooks these days in previous reviews. Given this it was a pleasure to read an older textbook for a change, a textbook not surprisingly published before the torrent of postmodernist and hence problematic textbooks since the 1990s and a textbook that provides a superb overview of one national history, the history of Australia, Frank Crowley's edited collection A New History of Australia (Melbourne: Heinemann, 1974).

A New History of Australia is divided into twelve chronological chapters all written by experts in the field ranging from the British settlement of Australia in the eighteenth century to the prime ministership of Gough Whitlam in 1972. Each chapter contains not only the highlights of Australian political and economic history of the specific eras. It also integrates social, demographic, and cultural histories into the chronological narrative making it an example of how well social, demographic, and cultural histories can be integrated into the more traditional political and economic history format. In this regard it is an outstanding example of how the old history and the new history can be melded to provide readers with a broad understanding of Australian history from above and from below.

Some, of course, will, not surprisingly, find things to criticise in A New History of Australia. Some reading it today will find the writing in some of the chapters somewhat antiquated. Some will decry something that is often present in other national histories of Australia, including the two volume The Cambridge History of Australia (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013), namely, chapters on pre-European Australia. Some, particularly those raised on postmodernist textbook robbery, will find the text too dense and encyclopedic, something I instead find worthy of praise. Some will undoubtedly find the book somewhat out of date and, admittedly, it has not been revised since 1974. Despite such criticism, however, A New HIstory of Australia, though published almost fifty years ago, remains a classic in the writing of Australian history. Very, very highly recommended.