The Runaround

~ This article first appeared in the Leader-Vindicator newspaper. ~

Sometime between Saturday, March 12, and Saturday, March 19, the 3G signal from which our mobile credit card reader operated was discontinued, rendering our machine useless.  The card reader company I’ll call Front Details failed to mention in any of their many communications that we’d be left out to dry.  I guess they figured we might not notice.

On a cold, snowing morning, I faced a line of people waiting in the miserable elements to purchase beef from my family only to discover a lack of signal on my card reader.  Stuck in the moment and lacking the luxury of a long technical analysis, I decided to switch to “no signal” mode, a feature that enables me to run cards at one time and then process the transactions later in the day when I can get the machine hooked up again.  No problem.

Except there was no longer anything to hook to.  When I got home we couldn’t extract the stored transactions from the machine and transfer it to our business account.  Front Details, when called regarding the problem, told us that their mobile card readers don’t work anymore, sorry, please hold on the line until you die and then we don’t have to deal with you.  Front Details’ regional troubleshooter, who is prompt when he’s selling, has yet to even stop by our store and offer a ray of hope (I’m writing in April).  We’re out the cost of the machine and all of the money it failed to transact on March 19, and there is no apparent hope of recovering anything.

This negligence is theft by deception.  If we operated in a similar manner, we’d go to jail.  When a large company does it, that’s just business.  Go eat your underwear if you’re mad.

As we were reeling in the aftermath of Front Details’ customer care, it became apparent that I’ll need to find another mobile card reader to replace the one that is now junk.  A friend offered to give us a card reader that operates from a cell phone platform, so we decided this was the way to go.

First, I needed to upgrade from my $7 flip phone to a smart phone.  No problem, I have a perfectly good hand-me-down that I can activate, link to the card reader, and I’ll be good to go.  A trip to my friendly Horizon store told me this was a preposterous idea and wouldn’t work.  They can’t (won’t) activate the phone.

The company Chirping Insect was happy to activate my hand-me-down phone.  They needed a secret code from Horizon to transfer my phone number.  Multiple, very long calls to Horizon revealed that they refuse to release the secret code for Chirping Insect. 

Ok.  This is ridiculous. 

Surely it is easier, since I have an existing Horizon account, to just upgrade with Horizon since they’re acting like fools anyway.  Horizon was thrilled with the new plan.

Horizon has a whole wall of display phones to choose from, but at the Horizon store – and this is purely by accident - the stock is limited to one, and it’s the most expensive on offer.  There was some rigmarole, and now our cell phone plan costs more than double what it used to.

This is theft by coercion.  If we operated like this with customers, we would be in jail.  With a big company, it’s just business.  Go eat your underwear.

At least I could take credit cards again and leave this nightmare behind.  At home, we fired up the TransactBuddy app and linked the mobile card reader to the new phone.  It failed.  To better serve us, TransactBuddy just redid their software and the reader we have, which is brand new in the package, is terminated.  We have to buy a new one.

Underwear.  Eat them.

Not one of the employees we encountered throughout this ordeal was even slightly surprised by the maddening actions of their employers.  They expected the process to be confusing and biased against the customer.  How must the expectation of neglect affect the human mind?  Is it possible to harass all day long and then transition into a normal social life at the end of the day?

Folks, this is considered normal, but it is not natural.

And it’s getting worse as technology further dilutes reality and companies morph into omnipresent guardians of “lifestyle”.  What are we, the actual members of society, gaining from all this technology being sold to us?  Someone makes billions and every family is broke as a result of the money transfer.  For example, all of the money we just spent from our little business, which is not exactly operating with cash reserves, is so that we have the right to start paying someone else for their service of money collection, and none of the crap works anyway.  Call me crazy, but wouldn’t it be so much better if the customer simply gave us a real, tangible dollar?  That won’t get lost in a software update, and it’s free to reach out and take it.

People make fun of me for my anti-tech tendencies, but gosh, I want off the ride.  It’s healthy for a body to reject poison.  Seek proximate people who make and grow necessary things, form a relationship, and pay them cash.  Or trade.  Or work.  Just keep the interactions real.

You’ll be treated like a person.