Complaint Review: magic jack

Today, Wed, April 3, 2013, my magic jack (not magic jack plus) stopped working.  Though the blue light was on in the actual magic jack USB plug in device, the magic jack window said "please connect to the internet and click here.  Error 3."  I tried it several times and it didn't work.  This was at about 5 pm PDT (CA time).

So I opened the magic jack chat box.  Until about 8 pm I was chatting with, in succession, jason, blake and nigel.  They had me do a huge number of things, none of which worked, and including plugging my magic jack into different computer usb ports, and changing all kinds of settings on my computer.  These changes included turning off my microsoft MSE security system for most of this time, which gave me the creeps, changing my firewall settings and security level, adding trusted sites, adding ports, and other things.  Many, many times I waited for many minutes for the chat person to return.  My case was obviously not a high priority, even after I complained that I had already been on for hours and requested that the chatter stay with me rather than keep going to other callers.

By about 730 pm they had put me in a totally different computer state, while each chatter had assured me they'd bring me back.  They never did.  I struggled another half hour to retrieve what I'd done and try to reconfigure my settings as they had been before the chat.  I'm still not sure if I succeeded.

Despite my ongoing and increasingly concerned complaints about the times they were putting me "on hold," and despite the fact that I had just send in another message one or two seconds before, suddenly the chat terminated at 8 pm, alleging I had "stayed away too long."  I could not believe my eyes.  My last efforts to try to re-establish my former computer settings were after being left alone completely.

My magic jack problem is not even remotely close to being solved.  Apparently all I can do is try to re-open a chat tomorrow.  But, I'm not feeling very good about this whole thing, or about magic jack by this time.  I had purchased 6 years of service on my magic jack, and it looks like the next 5 will probably be useless.  I'm probably going to see if I can get a refund and return my magic jack.

Customers, think twice before you even THINK about getting a magic jack (or ESPECIALLY a magic jack plus).  I don't know now when or if my magic jack problems will ever be solved.  Apparently they don't care much.  What can I say?  If you buy a magic jack, you'd better be very, very sure you're never going to have problems with the system.