Pros: It's cheap.
Cons: Everything except the price.
Summary: Initially, there was no problem. I registered and activated the phone with no problem. I generally use my home and work landlines. The cellphone is just for job hunting and emergencies. I have no idea when the tracfone stopped working, but I got a call from a headhunter one day. At the end of our job screening, he mentioned that my cellphone was not in service. Oh, I thought, it probably needs charging. No, he said, try calling it. It says the number is not in service. Sure, enough, that's what I got when I tried calling it. So, I went online to see what was up. I bought a 1-year card when I bought the plan. The phone showed that I still have 893 unused minutes. My account status online was INACTIVE. I tried to reactivate and it told me I needed to call customer support.
That's when things really went wrong. Customer service is in India. I can deal with that. I've lived with Indians. I can understand the accent. Unfortunately, this person really couldn't speak English. Beyond that, the person appeared to be a total moron. The call took an hour. She kept asking me the sam questions over and over and over again. She couldn't keep straight the serial number from the SIM number. I am not kidding--I had to read out those long numbers at least 12 different times. Forget about trying to get any explanation for what went wrong. All I got was that the SIM number was no good. It's the number on the SIM card, it's the number on the labels and booklet that came with the phone, and it's the number the cellphone display shows. It worked just fine when I first bought it a couple of months ago. So, they'll ship me a new SIM card, which could take 7 days. (That's assuming she got the phone, name and address correct, which I doubt. I had to keep giving her those over and over again too.) She had no answers. It was clear that everything she said was being read off a script card, and she kept stumbling over the words like it was the first time she had ever seen them and had no idea what they meant.
I bought the phone in early January and this is the end of May. Anyone care to offer an opinion about Tracfone extending my service to cover this whole period of time that I thought I had an active cellphone but really didn't? I'm just grateful I never had my car breakdown and hope I haven't missed any job opportunities.
