apologizing in advance if I break Prosebox in shiny things

Two entries?? In the same week??!!?? I haven’t made two entries in the same month since…well, since April, actually. I guess I won’t be doing that fun “first sentence from each month of the past year” thing on New Year’s Eve. Ah- I see I didn’t do it last year either, thanks to skipping months at a time. On the plus side, clearly I have nowhere to go but up.

It is shockingly quiet here at the office today - it’s “Reading Day”, the day between the last class day and the first final exam day, which means everyone is probably out drinking since it’s also Friday so finals don’t actually start until Monday. Not sure what the point of Reading Day is when it falls on a Friday, but at least it is peaceful.

It’s a little too quiet, actually. I am partially doing this to keep from falling asleep on my keyboard. I went to bed WAY too late last night, thanks to my enemies at Tracfone. Which is not even my phone company. (I wrote a sleep-crazed rant on FB last night while “chatting” - i.e., waiting 5 -10 minutes for each response from the sales rep - and completely forgot to mention that I don’t even have Tracfone. Baker B has Tracfone. I have Verizon, a proper phone company that has actual stores with actual people in them where you can take your problems and get them fixed quickly and calmly by a real person and not badly spelled long-drawn-out-chats that end up not accomplishing one thing other than making me completely insane. And sleep-deprived.)

Ok. Back story. I’ve had Verizon for nearly as long as I’ve had a cellphone. I started out with someone else but Verizon bought them so long ago that I don’t even remember their name now. Yes, Verizon is on the pricey side, and I know there are people who hate them, maybe even as much as I hate Tracfone. But I get a good discount for being a state employee, and I have a minimal plan - only 2 GBs of data, which apparently is bizarre, and even more bizarrely I rarely use more than half of it. And I have only had a problem once that I recall, and it was settled very quickly and courteously.

Baker B used to be on my Verizon plan. We just had two lines and no data way back then, before I got a smart phone. For some reason, we dropped him off my plan and he got a Tracfone. I think at the time it was considerably cheaper - we were paying something like $30 a month for his line and he never even used the phone except for calling me or his mom. He never even kept it on. Tracfone was just $10 a month for a cheapie plan with minimal minutes. Oh, I think his phone (one of my hand-me-downs, which is typical) quit working so it was WAY cheaper to get a new phone through them. This was quite a few years ago, and it mostly has been okay. He gets 120 minutes each month automatically, and mostly didn’t use them up (not a big phone chatter).

Things have gotten more complicated since his mom’s health has been deteriorating. She is 94 and still lives alone, but has serious mobility problems these days. Back in the spring she had I think three separate spells of being very ill, and Baker B went down there and stayed with her each time, like a week at a stretch (we live an hour away from her). While that was going on he was using way more minutes, of course, so I kept having to add them constantly for him. (Why doesn’t he add is own minutes?? Because for some unfathomable reason I’ve been the one who always adds them. Because I know how and he doesn’t, because I always do it. Adding the minutes is usually a pain, too. I have to do it online and it’s never quick and easy.)

WELL, yesterday he was down to six minutes (his mom has been very chatty lately when he calls her, and he’s calling a lot since she’s not well and her home health care person only comes twice a week). To give Baker B credit, he said if I’d show him how to do it the next day he’d start doing it himself. And I said, “Ok, and yes you are going to do this yourself from now on if you don’t join me at Verizon.”

Because my iPhone is over two years old now and I can get a new one and we can put him on my plan and he can use my current one for about what we are paying now for my Verizon plan and his constantly-adding-minutes Tracfone plan. I went and got a quote for several scenarios the other day. I’d like a new phone, although I’m quite happy with my current one (a 5C) - mainly I want us on the same plan, that I never have to mess with. AND he’d be easier to get in contact with if he had an iPhone that stays on and tells him when he’s missed a call — and I could also text him, which I could do now but he doesn’t have a keyboard to text back so wouldn’t, and it uses minutes just to read texts. AND he needs to join this century and get a smart phone. He agrees he’d like being able to read while in line at Starbucks each morning.

So what do I do? I totally forget that he was going to learn how to add minutes, and after he went to bed I added them myself. And then realized that instead of 60 minutes, it only added 30 (he got one of those Lifetime Double Minute deals with the phone). DAMNATION!! I said, and tried to find out what to do. You can’t just email them or - gasp- CALL someone. No. You have to join the support forum and ask your question (“where the fuck did the double minutes go???”) and then they reply and tell you to check your inbox. This is the answer to every single forum question - check your inbox, we’ve sent you a message. So you can’t get an answer from reading other people’s posts. SO I ask my question, they send me a message (pretty quickly, I will give them that). They tell me to go to chat.

Let me just say here that Baker B lost his phone about a year ago, and instead of just deactivating that one and activating the new one as a different phone, I thought you could replace the old one with the new one and keep the same plan and number and it would be way easier. Like you could if it was, oh, VERIZON!!! When that happened I went through this same Support Hell, and it drug on for TWO DAYS. At the time I told Baker B that if he ever ever EVER EVER loses that phone, he is on his own and he can figure it out his own damn self and I am DONE. And hahahahahaha!!! There I was in Support Hell again!

So I started all this at maybe 10:00. At midnight I was still staring at the chat screen, in between entering 30-digit strings of numbers repeatedly and telling Chat Person what the code said with each string. (I had to do the same thing with Lost Phone- Lost Phone needed to be turned on in order to replace it with New Phone, but that could not happen since Lost Phone was…LOST. So they read me strings of 30 digit numbers to punch in for like half an hour)

At 12:15 Chat Person says, “There’s a problem with the account. You’ll have to call Customer Support tomorrow.”

OH.MY.GOD.

Let’s just say that Baker B has been REALLY NICE to me today, and has said repeatedly, “We’ll do whatever you want about the phones! WHATEVER YOU WANT!!!!”

And I still have not called support. Honestly, I’m ready to just forget the extra minutes - and deactivate that damned phone on the 10th, before it reloads. And then I’ll burn it. And dance around it as it burns.