In terms of bureaucratic inefficiencies and ineptitudes, this ranks low on the “potential damage to persons” scale, but keeping with my belief that our acceptance of such smaller incidences leads to acceptance of truly dangerous ones, this is worthy of report.

I’m not someone who needs all the latest electronic toys. Only once did I do a 30-day trial of an upper tier cell phone plan.  All the little extra charges made me faint, so I ditched that for a Tracfone.  I’ve been happy with Tracfone, too, until just recently.  I upgraded my phone to one that was advertised as having voice activated dialing (VAD), which is the only really safe way to dial and drive at the same time.

Turns out the phone does not have VAD, as I started to suspect when all attempts to set it up led to dead-ends, and which was also attested to by this web page, first paragraph.  My email to Tracfone about the phone not having the advertised feature received a curt reply assuring me the phone does have the feature.  Next I called Tracfone support and spent over an hour talking with a couple of different tech people who finally were themselves stymied by their inability to set up VAD on the LG200C cell phone.  They told me they were going to “escalate” the matter and I would be hearing from someone.

That was four weeks ago, and I haven’t heard anything from anyone.  In the meantime, Tracfone continues to advertise the LG200C as having VAD.

I’m sending a follow-up email to Tracfone today.  I’ll hope to hear from them soon, and will updatge here whether or not I do.  I was happy with them for a long time, and hope I will be again.

08/02/2009 Update: The response so far from Tracfone ws not good.  The email sent to me this afternoon included the same old incorrect instructions that they’d sent before, and referring me to the same incorrect manual that they had before. However, all is not lost.  In my frustration I kept fiddling around with the phone, and figured out how to activate voice dialing. You can find the instructions here.  I’ll stick with Tracfone for now–their plan suits my needs more economically than others.  But their customer service has a lot of room for improvement.

Peace.

Deborah Alicen