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.