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Yesterday was a lousy day. This Assurancewireless.com free telephone offer is a rip-off as far as I'm concerned. It's owned by Virgin Mobile and apparently they get money from the American government to provide a wireless phone to poor people like me.
I applied for it and they sent me this phone and a Quick Start booklet that indicates that it can be activated in 8 easy steps. I performed each task as recommended and it didn't work. Then, I went to their web site and attempted to activate it over the web.
When I entered the information to activate the phone, the web site said the information didn't get through and to try it again. I tried again and the website rejected my submittal again, and said I should call a number.
I called the number and none of their stated options fit my situation because I needed a phone number to get an answer, but I couldn't get a phone number until the cell phone was activated, so they provided a number to some place where English is not their primary language.
I politely tried to talk to the guy and he tried to instruct me on what I needed to do to activate the phone, but I couldn't understand him and kept asking him to repeat what he said. Finally, he hung up on me, and left me holding my reliable touch-tone home phone disconcerted and angry with frustration.
Then, when I tried to activate again via the web site, and they shut me down and I couldn't even find them with Google search. I literally got a message saying the web site was presently unavailable. I did this again several hours later, and Google couldn't find them again after I tried to activate the phone.
I sent an e-mail to a Contact Us point I found at the web site after I got there through their hundreds of advertisements, and got an automated response saying they would be in touch within 24 hours. A few hours later they sent an e-mail that said I had to go through one of their "advisers" again in India (I suppose) to get my 250 free minutes.
This time, after a fairly long wait on hold, a woman finally spoke English well enough for us to communicate at some primitive level. The first thing she told me to do was to take the back off the phone, take the battery the Quick Start booklet had instructed me to install, and find the serial number of the phone behind where the battery was. That wasn't easy, but I finally got it for her.
Then, she asked me for the numbers on my approval letter I got from Assurance Wireless and she warned me to keep the numbers handy, and then she gave me the telephone number for the phone. I asked her if the phone was activated now, and she told me it was, but I'd have to wait four hours for it to take effect.
This happened late yesterday afternoon and I still can't activate the phone and I keep getting the same message I got initially: Service not available. It's beginning to dawn on me what's going on here.
Virgin Mobile, a British billionaire's company is getting money from the American taxpayers for a cheap Asian wireless phone maintained by mindless, unintelligible Indian outsourcing for a service Assurancewireless.com knows perfectly well doesn't work.
I complained in another e-mail that will bring another robotic, automated response that will tell me it's my fault their system don't work in my neighborhood, but I'd bet my bottom dollar they still get the money from the government because they assigned me a useless phone number. How do I know it's useless. I called the telephone number they assigned me and an operator told me it was "out of service".
I drove to several locations in and around the little town I live in and never got any receptivity bars anywhere within ten miles. What good is that? It's Virgin Mobile's company. They know they don't have the towers for receptivity here.
I would write to the Better Business Bureau to complain, and I still might. Apparently I love to torture myself thinking there is some sort of natural system of justice in the world, but the BBB is operated by capitalists who have their own agenda in mind. God bless America.
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I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
