Rather than wasting any more of my time by describing how crooked this Tracfone outfit is, let me go over to the main point: STAY AWAY - DO NOT TOUCH THIS "COMPANY" BY A MILE LONG POLE.

In the past month, though I can receive texts just fine, more often than not I get a "Sending Failed" message several times before one will go through. This wasn't happening before. Sometimes it helps if I go outside or to an outside corner of the house, but since I show I have enough bars for reception I don't understand why that's necessary.

In addition, by the reception bars there is often a tiny symbol, a black phone with red lines through it, which indicates the system won't accept any messages, may be overloaded, but I'd never gotten that before either, in the three years I'd managed to hold onto this phone.

And it takes forever to load new minutes, during which time I get a "Unregistered SIM" message which doesn't communicate anything to me--do I try to add the minutes again, do I just wait, is something wrong?