First, off, sometimes it’s acceptable to decide that the cost of a problem is still cheaper than the solution. FasTrak could decide that the way to deal with clones is to credit anybody who calls and disputes a charge, as I did. People would try to abuse this, but you simply don’t let any one person get away with more than one, maybe two disputes. But, if that’s a conscious decision, you have to push it to the lowest level support reps. It could have cost them $10 – the $5 credit plus $5 (being very generous) for the time required for one dispute phone call. But, my dispute probably cost FasTrak a couple of hundred dollars and I was prepared to make it far more expensive. I called them probably 6 or 8 times, talked to a manager, wrote to them, etc. What a bunch of maroons…

The other eye opening thing was how totally technologically illiterate their customer service staff is. We see it all the time in countless other support operations where untrained people working from a script force us to waste huge amounts of time trying solutions we know won’t work. But we also know how glorious it is when we get the one person on the line who actually understands the technology he/she supports and the problem is solved quickly and painlessly. In my last conversation with FasTrak they offered to refund my $5 if I would send my transponder in (at my expense…) for testing so they could find out what was wrong with it. Think about that for a sec – it was in my car, in my driveway, 60 miles from the GG bridge at the moment they say I drove across the bridge with it. And they think some defect in the transponder itself caused the GG bridge equipment to think it saw my transponder? It could be this was just another hoop to make me jump through in their misguided effort to save $5 by spending hundreds talking to me on the phone and making me send a written dispute and making me ship them the transponder – maybe the next step would have been a request to bring my car in for inspection. Or it could be that they know more about clones than they admit and wanted my transponder out of the system since some cloner somewhere apparently has grabbed my ID. But, the simplest answer being the correct one, the truth is that the vast majority of people who work for FasTak don’t have a frigging clue how the damn thing works! Oh, what a better world it would be if more companies were more concerned with educating their workers.

I hope they realize how bad it will all get if they don’t improve their fraud prevention act. And I hope they’re silently working on something. But, based on my experience so far, they’re just incompetent.

sincerely, james Mead