Back on Trac

We use Tracfone cell phones because not only are they cheaper, but there is no long term commitment. You can add minutes as you please, and if you plan it right, you can use it for a year for about $80-90. This includes plenty of minutes, or at least more than we could ever use, because we don’t use our cell phones excessively.

That said, however, it is important to keep the days up to date. Of course, we let it lapse, and the phone was disconnected. This is a bummer because any leftover minutes were now lost. They carry over every time you extend the plan, but when the phone expires, the minutes are lost. Now aside from the waste, this isn’t a huge deal because we have more minutes than we would probably use in a lifetime, but the real problem is getting the phone reconnected. It’s almost as if they are making it hard on you to discourage this from happening.

I tried to reconnect the phone, and was it a pain in the YKW. First off, they change the phone number once it’s disconnected. This leads to some sort of miscommunication between the company and your phone, because the phone number listed on the phone had not changed. This led to all sorts of problems getting the phone to work, compounded by the fact that we don’t get great service where we live, and in order to talk to customer service, you need a working phone, i.e., a landline. I spent a great deal of time talking to tech service trying to get this phone to work again, and I was almost at the point where I was ready to just buy a new one. They cost less than $10, but what a waste.

Finally, after what seemed like an hour or two on the phone, entering all sorts of codes and talking to people for whom English was clearly not their first language, I got the phone to work. It wasn’t easy, but I hung in there, probably more than the average person, who could have just replaced the phone in minutes for not much cost. Not sure what the better solution is, because it’s not an issue of money, or is it? I just hate the idea of throwing away a perfectly good phone, but that’s the world we live in.

Until the next time, thanks for reading, and thanks to Zach Bonnell for the pic.