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Tracfone, I kind of hate you
Monday, December 29th, 2014 06:38 pm(Well, as much as I can hate anything with the kitten being home, which isn't very much. :-) )
I bought a cell phone to help deal with the kitten emergency. Yes, me, a cell phone. Those who know me will appreciate just how desperate that means things were. ;-) I went with Tracfone because they seemed to have the best coverage map for our area, and because the phone I liked best anyway happened to be with Tracfone. (The fact that said phone was on sale for a whopping five bucks wasn't the deciding factor, but it didn't hurt any.)
I managed to activate the phone, add minutes, and do all the other basic set-up reasonably gracefully, given that I was dealing with, to me, hostile alien technology, and given that I had not one single nerve to spare. The difficulty came in accessing my voice-mail. I'd set it up easily enough; I just couldn't get into it to retrieve any messages I might have.
Since I'd given the number out to the few people most likely to be calling us with a live Mallory sighting, this added a measure of stress to a situation that really already had all the stress it could support and then some. I mean, I'd have kept the device chained to my side regardless, but it would have been nice to be able to go to sleep or take a shower without worrying that I'd miss THE call and never even be able to get the message to know about it.
So after a few days (because all Tracfone procedures include "wait 10 minutes" and "wait 24-48 hours" if it doesn't work right away), I called tech support.
I was on the phone for two mortal hours the first time -- on our land line, which needed to be clear to receive kitten calls -- talking to techs who did not speak English as a first language, on a connection that I'm sure Tracfone wouldn't use to advertise their wares to anybody who hadn't already given them money. ("Joshua" and "Roger", my ass.) The vast majority of that time was listening to their scripted versions of "my computer's fucking slow, please keep waiting", but they did run me through the set-up repeatedly, walking me through trying (and failing) to access my voice-mail, wash rinse repeat. It's a good thing I didn't have any vitally important messages, since one of their favorite things to try was to wipe everything and have me start over from scratch (without even the courtesy of warning me first). This finally ended with yet another wipe-and-re-set-up, and a "wait 24-48 hours". Yeah, right.
Shockingly, that still didn't work, so two days later there was another call to tech support. On a friend's cell phone, so I could keep the land line free. This involved a slightly better ESL-speaker on an even shittier connection, and much shouting of "I can barely hear you, can you repeat that?" He tried a variety of things including the entering of arcane codes in obscure places and pulling the battery (an experience in itself), and, of course, wiping everything and having me set it all up again. (Though at least he warned me.) And then, you guessed it, "wait 24-48 hours", in hopes that it would all magically start working, I guess.
At this point I'd pretty much given up on having voice-mail for the duration. Surprised I was to get a call from Tracfone customer service, pursuing the matter on their own initiative. (On the land line, of course, which was wildly inconvenient.) So as with every other technician (at least this one had a much-less-impenetrable accent), we went through the whole problem again, wiped everything back to factory, did all the set-up again, tried and failed to get into my voice-mail, and tried again, at which point this conversation ensued:
Me: "Okay, it's asking for my password. I'm entering my password... and I'm hitting OK."
Her: "No, don't hit OK."
Me: "...all right, what do I hit, then? Send?"
Her: "No, just type your password."
Me: "Then how do I tell it I'm done?" (For Tracfone passwords aren't a fixed length.)
Her (paraphrased): "Don't press anything, just put in your password."
Yes, folks, apparently the problem was that for Tracfone passwords, you just type the digits and wait for the phone to realize you're not going to give it anything else. By hitting OK (and on what the hell system do you not hit Enter or OK or some special key to indicate you're done with your input, especially on a non-fixed-length field but usually even on most fixed-length ones?!?) I was messing up the process, and the poor little system was dumping to "your call cannot be completed as dialed" because it didn't know how to cope with this exotic input.
Now, I used to work tech support. I am very good about telling a support tech everything that I am doing, even the obvious stuff. Which means I had told every tech every time I'd hit OK, and what with one thing and another that was about forty times.
If I had just had one single technician who (a) spoke English (b) on a decently clear line, and (c) knew their own system (and how to do their fucking job), the whole problem could have been resolved in five minutes. If there'd been decent instructions, there never would have been a problem in the first place.
I've since been told that Tracfone has a reputation for this; their equipment and coverage are good, but their tech support is awful. I have to agree. I'd originally bought the phone with the understanding (a.k.a. sop to my pride) that it was a "burn phone", and I could just let it expire after the emergency if I wanted to. However, I think I'll be keeping it active, in large part because otherwise I might have to go through the set-up process again! I suspect this, in fact, of being Tracfone's evil plan.
I bought a cell phone to help deal with the kitten emergency. Yes, me, a cell phone. Those who know me will appreciate just how desperate that means things were. ;-) I went with Tracfone because they seemed to have the best coverage map for our area, and because the phone I liked best anyway happened to be with Tracfone. (The fact that said phone was on sale for a whopping five bucks wasn't the deciding factor, but it didn't hurt any.)
I managed to activate the phone, add minutes, and do all the other basic set-up reasonably gracefully, given that I was dealing with, to me, hostile alien technology, and given that I had not one single nerve to spare. The difficulty came in accessing my voice-mail. I'd set it up easily enough; I just couldn't get into it to retrieve any messages I might have.
Since I'd given the number out to the few people most likely to be calling us with a live Mallory sighting, this added a measure of stress to a situation that really already had all the stress it could support and then some. I mean, I'd have kept the device chained to my side regardless, but it would have been nice to be able to go to sleep or take a shower without worrying that I'd miss THE call and never even be able to get the message to know about it.
So after a few days (because all Tracfone procedures include "wait 10 minutes" and "wait 24-48 hours" if it doesn't work right away), I called tech support.
I was on the phone for two mortal hours the first time -- on our land line, which needed to be clear to receive kitten calls -- talking to techs who did not speak English as a first language, on a connection that I'm sure Tracfone wouldn't use to advertise their wares to anybody who hadn't already given them money. ("Joshua" and "Roger", my ass.) The vast majority of that time was listening to their scripted versions of "my computer's fucking slow, please keep waiting", but they did run me through the set-up repeatedly, walking me through trying (and failing) to access my voice-mail, wash rinse repeat. It's a good thing I didn't have any vitally important messages, since one of their favorite things to try was to wipe everything and have me start over from scratch (without even the courtesy of warning me first). This finally ended with yet another wipe-and-re-set-up, and a "wait 24-48 hours". Yeah, right.
Shockingly, that still didn't work, so two days later there was another call to tech support. On a friend's cell phone, so I could keep the land line free. This involved a slightly better ESL-speaker on an even shittier connection, and much shouting of "I can barely hear you, can you repeat that?" He tried a variety of things including the entering of arcane codes in obscure places and pulling the battery (an experience in itself), and, of course, wiping everything and having me set it all up again. (Though at least he warned me.) And then, you guessed it, "wait 24-48 hours", in hopes that it would all magically start working, I guess.
At this point I'd pretty much given up on having voice-mail for the duration. Surprised I was to get a call from Tracfone customer service, pursuing the matter on their own initiative. (On the land line, of course, which was wildly inconvenient.) So as with every other technician (at least this one had a much-less-impenetrable accent), we went through the whole problem again, wiped everything back to factory, did all the set-up again, tried and failed to get into my voice-mail, and tried again, at which point this conversation ensued:
Me: "Okay, it's asking for my password. I'm entering my password... and I'm hitting OK."
Her: "No, don't hit OK."
Me: "...all right, what do I hit, then? Send?"
Her: "No, just type your password."
Me: "Then how do I tell it I'm done?" (For Tracfone passwords aren't a fixed length.)
Her (paraphrased): "Don't press anything, just put in your password."
Yes, folks, apparently the problem was that for Tracfone passwords, you just type the digits and wait for the phone to realize you're not going to give it anything else. By hitting OK (and on what the hell system do you not hit Enter or OK or some special key to indicate you're done with your input, especially on a non-fixed-length field but usually even on most fixed-length ones?!?) I was messing up the process, and the poor little system was dumping to "your call cannot be completed as dialed" because it didn't know how to cope with this exotic input.
Now, I used to work tech support. I am very good about telling a support tech everything that I am doing, even the obvious stuff. Which means I had told every tech every time I'd hit OK, and what with one thing and another that was about forty times.
If I had just had one single technician who (a) spoke English (b) on a decently clear line, and (c) knew their own system (and how to do their fucking job), the whole problem could have been resolved in five minutes. If there'd been decent instructions, there never would have been a problem in the first place.
I've since been told that Tracfone has a reputation for this; their equipment and coverage are good, but their tech support is awful. I have to agree. I'd originally bought the phone with the understanding (a.k.a. sop to my pride) that it was a "burn phone", and I could just let it expire after the emergency if I wanted to. However, I think I'll be keeping it active, in large part because otherwise I might have to go through the set-up process again! I suspect this, in fact, of being Tracfone's evil plan.
