The Technology columnist in the local paper has written recently about is wife’s use of her TracPhone. This is a cell phone service where one buy units as needed. Cards for this service can be bought at various stores including Radio Shack and Wal-Mart. A couple of years ago daughter Ann gave me a Nokia with minutes available. Later I added 300 units so that I could use the phone on a cross country trip. I had used a phone from a motel in Bismarck once to report on son Jim’s surgery and it cost the proverbial arm and leg. Calls on the TracPhone cost around 33 cents per unit. One unit local and two units long distance. I called Portland last night from my basement office and the connection was very good.
The reason for this Blog is to report my recent experience in loading new units. I get an e-mail from TracPhone occasionally offering a deal to add units. One needs to do this in order to preserve one’s call number - not that I expect people to call me using that number. It MAY come in handy someday. Anyway I went through the procedure from my G4 dial-up as previously, but nothing was added to the Nokia. I decided to give it another go, but was told that the Promotional Code granting additional free units had already been used. I did a few more operations, but still no more units.
I regularly check my credit card accounts and found that TracPhone had charged me twice at $99.99 for units not received. I e-mailed them twice at about 5-7 day intervals and got no response. Yesterday I called their 800 number and got a very pleasant lady with the typical accent (thing India) who said that her name was Cynthia. She walked me through the process (time consuming) and lo and behold there are the additional units. She then transferred me to their credit card section and I talked with another lady who said her name was Lisa. She asked a few questions, assured me that the second charge would be removed and gave me a confirmation number. I have to say that I was pleased with the response I got with the phone call, but I still wonder if they every answer their e-mail.
Enough already. I’ll talk more about the flat world we live in later.
That Phone # by the way is: 208-3279. Not that it is turned on with any regularity.
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3 comments:
Well, what good is giving us the number if you never turn it on! That is like giving us a new email address and telling us you rarely check it. Oh well, I guess we know where to reach you when we know you are away from home. Said information would come to our email in-boxes that we do check, with great regularity.
I let my registration time pass by once or twice when I still had lots of minutes left and didn't want to buy new minutes. I couldn't use the phone until I added more minutes and I lost the phone number, but I never use it to recieve calls anyway. I just buy the minimum number of minutes each time. I've never lost minutes at all.
Dad, they are a phone company. Of course they never answer their email. They are too busy answering the phone. :-)
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