As it happens, you can use Amazon’s Android app-getting application on the Curtis LT7033 with a little finagling, and most reports say the hardware is good; the only problem is with the software, and since you’re going to replace that immediately it doesn’t matter.

But this is kind of offensive to me, the same way it would be to buy a brand-new $15,000 car and be forced to buy a $5000 aftermarket engine for it right away because the factory one is a total dog.

So… hmmm… what other super-cheap tablets are out there? I wrote about this a few weeks ago, with a strong look at tablets available from an international retailer called LightInThe Box.com. I also checked Amazon, but was not impressed with the tablets they offered.

The store I forgot to check was Wal-Mart. They may be the dregs of American retail, but since all tablet computers are made in China anyway, Wal-Mart is no worse a place to buy one than anywhere else.

At WalMart.com I found this $69 tablet, accompanied by copy that explicitly says it has Google Play pre-installed.

Since not all Android apps work with all Android hardware, there’s still a little risk. But Wal-Mart’s shipping is free, and if I don’t like it a return won’t be a lot of trouble because their nearest store is less than five miles away.

So I have ordered a “Nextbook 7 Tablet with 8GB Memory” from Wal-Mart. I don’t expect a whole lot from it for $69. I just want to read books and watch 480p videos on it, maybe read and respond to a little email while lounging on my patio. That sort of thing.

My cheap tablet will be here in a week or so. When it gets here, I’ll let you know if it’s worth what I paid for it.

The Starlight Blue Android 4.0 Tablet with 7 Inch Capacitive Screen (4GB,WiFi, 1.5GHz, 3G, Camera) for $69.99 (plus about $11 shipping) is almost their least expensive tablet, but it has strong enough specs that it ought to be able to show a YouTube or Netflix movie without stuttering. And if a 10-year-old granddaughter breaks it, replacing it won’t be overly painful. Add a bright red keyboard/carrying case combo for $12.99 and you have a machine that can do homework, too.

Just about any Android 4.0 tablet ought to be good for our girls — and your teens and pre-teens, too. Or even for you and me. These are not telco tablets. They access the rest of the world through WiFi, not a wireless carrier, so there is no monthly charge to use them. Just drop in at a restaurant or other business that offers free WiFi and you’re good to go even if you don’t have WiFi at home (or you’re on a camping trip or you’re homeless).

If you want to turn up your nose at these cheap tablets, you might want to check out this techradar.com article about the 15 best Android tablets in the world. They run $199 and (way) up. Not exactly what we want if we are worried about breakage, but there are times when we deserve rewards in the form of high-end toys, right?

Amazon.com also has a whole herd of low-cost Android tablets. Just about the top offering they have is the Coby Kyros 7-Inch Android 4.0 4 GB Internet Tablet 16:9 Capacitive Multi-Touch Widescreen with Built-In Camera for $97.83 plus free shipping (at the time I wrote this; Amazon prices often change radically without notice). This is a pretty decent deal. It may not be the world’s greatest tablet, but what do you expect for less than $100?

The big question is, “How good does a tablet need to be?”

To me, it’s a working tool. I don’t need super-high screen resolution. Even if I’m watching a movie, it’s a 7 inch screen. 880X480 pixels is more than enough for me on something that small. If I want a big screen, I have one. It’s called a 42″ Vizio high definition TV. It has great resolution, but it won’t fit in my pocket or even in a backpack.

In my life, in 2013, $100 is plenty to spend on a tablet, and 7 inches is plenty big. If I want something larger, I have a sub-notebook with an 11.6″ screen and a built-in keyboard. And Bluetooth and all kinds of cool stuff I hardly ever use. And if my notebook isn’t big enough, I have a desktop computer with two monitors, one of them 24″ wide, that I use for video editing — but not for writing stories (like this one) out on my patio, which is where I happen to be right now, using my notebook computer.

It’s easy to accumulate screens, isn’t it?

Maybe too easy.

I am sorely tempted, at this very moment, to buy that $98.99 Scorpius tablet from Lightinthebox.com for myself or perhaps as a Mother’s Day gift for my wife.

Hmmmm…. I’ll think about it for a day or two. One thing I’ve learned in the last 60 decades is not to rush into a purchase. If it’s worth buying today, it will be worth buying tomorrow.

And if it’s *not* worth buying tomorrow, I will be glad I *didn’t* get it.

The total came to over $2900. Amazing. Might as well trade the old Hyundai in on a new one, eh?

Except that I fixed cars for a living in my younger days, my father owned a machine shop and did most of our family repairs, including car stuff, and even though I am now too sick and decrepit to crawl under cars a whole lot, I know guys like Jesse who don’t charge anything near what a dealer does for labor.

And parts prices. Let’s start there. A cabin air filter for $44.95? I can get one for $10 or less. Engine air filter for $24.95? Again, less than $10.

Now let’s go to the top of the dealer’s sales list and look at the “CEI related” items. $654.06 plus tax.

I have access to something magic called “the Internet.” Did you know there are discussion websites for Hyundai owners, where they swap repair advice? There are similar sites for Jeep Cherokees, too, which is a good thing because I own one of those as well as the Hyundai. And whatever make of car you have, there’s probably a discussion board for it where you can learn what other people have done to remedy the “Check Engine Light” on with a “Fuel System Problem” code, and the “gas tank almost impossible to fill” problem that often seems to accompany it in Hyundais.

Ah ha! We are not the first ones to run into these symptoms. Many others say they can be fixed by replacing the fuel evaporation canister and blowing out the lines to it with compressed air, and that replacing the associated valves is almost never necessary but is no big deal if they’re clogged so badly that cleaning them with a little solvent doesn’t clear them right up.

The manufacturer’s suggested retail price, which is what the dealer charges, for a Hyundai original equipment evaporative canister, is 160.98.

You’ve heard of eBay, right? Me too. And did you know that many car parts dealers and junkyards use eBay as a sales channel? I found a parts guy who had that exact same canister for (hold your breath) $17.96, brand-new. With free shipping. Chances are slim that we really need either of the two valves the dealer recommends, but even if we get them they’re more like $20 each at local parts stores than $100+, which is what the dealer charges for each of them. And labor on that job? Sure, the canister is under the car and takes some jacking and crawling to get to, but once you’ve jacked the car and put jackstands under it (for safety; you NEVER get under a car held up only by a jack) it’s a two-bolt job. And two little hose clamps. The valves are just as easy to replace. Call it 15 to 30 minutes of labor.

So basically, I shopped the dealer’s $654 job down to well under $100, even if I pay Jesse to do it instead of doing it myself.

The rest of the items on the dealer repair list are also way out of line on price. Tuneup? They want $255.87 — on a 4-cylinder car. In real life the parts are $30 – $40, and it’s a top-of-the-car job I can easily do in 15 minutes. And that dealer likes to sell services like brake fluid, power steering and transmission fluid flushes way more often than they are needed, as this article from AOL points out: Fluid Flush Fallacy: Just a ‘Nightline’ Away From Scandal.

Amazing, isn’t it? And even more amazing, some people actually pay those prices, just as some people pay the blue-shirted Weak Squad people for heavily overpriced PC repairs.

There is an entire automotive underground in this country that fixes cars for a lot less money than a dealership or a fancy, heavily-advertised repair shop charges. The most visible members of this underground are chain parts stores such as AutoZone and Advance Auto Parts. I mention these two because they’re close to my home. There are many others, and a lot of them will recommend a local mechanic for you if you don’t know one. If nothing else, they’ll sell you parts for half or a quarter of their cost at the car dealer. Quality? Just as good, for the most part, and sometimes better.

Finding a Decent Mechanic

Plenty of low-overhead and mobile mechanics (who come to you with a service truck) advertise on Craiglist. Many more rely purely on referrals and repeat customers to keep their schedules full. How do you find this last bunch? Look for people who have good-looking older cars and ask them who they use. There is no way anyone is going to maintain a 1996 Jeep Cherokee (my car) as a daily driver at dealership repair prices. Rather, that car is maintained by me, Jesse, and sometimes Rebel, a morose biker and near-genius mechanic with a long beard who splits shop space with an appliance repair person I know in a low-rent backstreet industrial park.

I’m paying these guys something like 1/3 of what a dealership charges for labor, and they’re happy to get it, because it’s more than they’d get working at the dealership. And by working for themselves they get a level of freedom the local Hyundai dealership would never give them.

Referrals are also the best way to find a technician or network engineer to take care of your home or business computers. Do you belong to a Chamber of Commerce or other business group? Ask fellow members for advice. Failing that, ask businesses you patronize who they use. There are lots of competent IT techs who don’t want to work for someone else and keep their prices low to stay busy, and a little energy spent finding them will reward you ten-fold — if not more.

It all comes down to the Cheap Computing mindset, which is identical to the Cheap Car Repair mindset. Both will save you tons of money, and give you better-running cars and computers than spending top dollar for the most expensive service companies around, especially if you learn to do a little of the lighter maintenance and repair work yourself.

Since Apple and Apple buyers live in a different reality from the rest of us, an Apple product on sale for a little less than list is a wondrous thing, and we should not sneeze at the idea of saving money however and wherever we can.

Yes, I know. For every Apple product on sale, if you think a little different you can find something that will do the job just as well for half the price. You can also point out that my old (but new to me) Jeep Cherokee is more practical off-road transportation than an Audi Quattro for less than 1/5 the price, but there are plenty of people who prefer the Audi — and no doubt own iPhones instead of Android phones, too.

But even Audi and Apple buyers like to save a buck now and then, which is why they need to know about Apple’s Certified Refurbished Products outlet on eBay.

This is where you get a 64 GB iPod Touch for $229, reduced from $399. If an iPod Touch is a “gotta have it” item for you or a family member, this is worth a look. At least.

Some of us don’t even consider Apple products, either because they’re expensive, because we aren’t in love with the way they work, or both. But again: Some wouldn’t have anything else, and they have a right to be as cheap as the rest of us even though they like to stay in Apple’s proprietary universe. Which is a fine place to be for a lot of people; don’t get us wrong on that.

Here’s the dealnews story from which we grabbed the infographic: Price Trends: When to Buy a Mac

Here’s the readwrite take on the same infographic: How Long Should You Wait For Deals On Apple Products?

From the readwrite story comes the best advice in this whole schmear, condensed from the dealnews piece:

Dealnews offers another tip from its research. If you want the best price for Apple products, don’t buy them from Apple! Instead, wait until a new model comes out, then haunt the MacMalls and Best Buys of the world and buy the previous version days or weeks after the new release. You can thank us — and Dealnews — later.

So you can. These are the best Apple money-saving tips I’ve ever seen. Please use them for good, not evil.
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The dealnews Infographic:

I have used LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org On computers running Linux, Mac, and many kinds of Windows. And before long it may be available for Android, too; LibreOffice developers are working on it even as we speak.

“Real professionals” all use Microsoft Office, right? What does that make me? Chopped liver? I’ve been a professional writer for close to 30 years, and I have never owned a copy of Microsoft Office. Some people might say that’s because I’m too cheap to spring for an expensive Microsoft program when there’s a free alternative available?

And you know what? That’s true!

Did you notice that this blog is called Cheap Computing? Not Big-Money Computing? Yes, I am a fanatical money-saver. And proud of it. But I’m not a cheapskate. I just like to allocate money my way, not someone else’s. Every dollar I don’t spend with Microsoft is a dollar I have for eating out, buying gifts for my lovely wife or for other fun things. Or that I can put aside “just in case.”

So please, let’s try to spend as little money on software as we can.

What we can do with LibreOffice

There’s a graphic at the bottom of this blog post that shows LibreOffice features. Note that email is not among them. For email, you may choose GMail from Google, which is what I use (great spam filters!) or what many Linux users have done for many years: use Thunderbird, the Mozilla Foundation’s email companion to the Firefox browser.

I’ll confess: even though I’ve been using GMail for over a year now, I will soon go back to Thunderbird — and use it to access GMail.

Email is really the main “lack” in LibreOffice, but there are obviously other free, open source programs that are at least as good as Outlook. Same with any other feature you see in Microsoft Office; there is almost certainly a better-cheaper-faster open source alternative — assuming there isn’t one in LibreOffice, which there probably is.

Joking Aside, LibreOffice 4 is a Stunning Advance

Earlier versions of this software were not fast to open, and had other built-in slowdows here and there. The best way to overcome the frustration over the slowness was to remind yourself that you had not paid hundred of dollars for this program, sort of like reminding yourself that you bought your Hyundai because it was cheap and relliable, not because it was a speed demon.

But LibreOffice 4 is nice and responsive. Start up Writer, the part of it I use most often, and BANG! There it is. Ditto Impress, the slide creation utility I use when I’m going to do a speech and need slides. Same with Draw. And Calc, the spreadsheet module. Very nice!

In fact “Very Nice” is an accurate description of LibreOffice in general. It’s absolutely worth trying, even if you tried earlier LibreOffice versions — or OpenOffice.org or StarOffice — and didn’t like them.

You especially owe it to yourself to try LibreOffice if you get a new computer; according to Wikipedia’s Microsoft Office page, “Beginning with Office 2013, an individual license is assigned permanently to the computer on which the software was installed. Licenses can no longer be un-assigned and re-assigned to a different computer owned by the same user. This is a departure from previous versions.”

Well, well, well. It sounds like Microsoft no longer wants our office suite software business, doesn’t it? Not, at least, if we have individual software licenses instead of a corporate site license.

LibreOffice? No licensing problems! No Sekrit Codes to type in to get it to work! Put it on all the computers you like, for $0.00 per computer, and enjoy using the same office software on your Windows, Mac, and Linux computers — a pleasure you cannot have if you use Microsoft Office, because there is no Microsoft Office for Linux.

Video editing is the one and only reason I endure Windows. I’ve simplified most of my video editing needs to the point where I may be able to use a basic editing program, as long as it doesn’t crash and lose work, as Linux video editors I’ve tried in the past have been prone to do.

Why Do I Love Linux, Considering the Video Editing Problem?

Linux is really and truly more reliable than Windows. Flat-out stable. And the only viruses that attack end-user Linux PCs like mine tend to exist only in sales literature for commercial virus-fighting programs, not in real life. I’ll admit: I haven’t had a Windows virus for a long time, and (free from Microsoft) Windows Defender is the only anti-malware software I use. Still, a little Linux peace of mind is good in a turvy world, no?

And Linux is free. The lack of dollar cost is nice, but even better is the lack of long secret codes you need to type (or paste) into little forms to make the darn software work. And when installing, no endless reboots. Typically just one. Even more fun: When you install Windows, you then need to install your office software and a bunch of other programs before you can use it. Linux typically comes bundled with LibreOffice, which is as free as Linux itself, and is an excellent office suite.

Is LibreOffice Microsoft Office? No. It’s different. In some ways it’s better, and in some ways not as good. I have used LibreOffice and its predecessors OpenOffice and StarOffice since 1998. I’ve written three books and countless articles in these free office suites, running on Linux, without a hitch. I’ve tried Microsoft Office a few times, but frankly, I didn’t like it much — surely not enough to spring for even an academic license — or to put out the effort needed to grab a bootleg copy.

And LibreOffice 4.0, which just came out, is WOW! I am amazed. Fast and excellent.

Linux has me spoiled, and after a while it may spoil you, too. Use it for a year, even if you are frustrated at times, and you may find that this old saying is 100% true: “Once you go Linux, you never go back.”

There are lots of different styles (flavors?) of Linux. I usually recommend Ubuntu as the first one to try these days. It’s popular, support is easy to get (and free), and it works on most hardware without any trouble. But OpenSUSE is good, too. Ditto Fedora and a whole bunch of others, although not all Linux variants (typically called “distributions”) are aimed at beginning users.

I can go on and on about Linux, more or less forever. But for now, let me just say, “try it, you’ll like it.” One great thing about Ubuntu (and other distributions) is the ability to run them from CD or DVD without installing them. They’re dog-slow this way, because optical drives are many times slower than the slowest hard drive, but at least you can get an idea of what Linux is all about.

If you’re running Windows, you can safely and easily install Linux on your computer with their Windows installer. I’ve used it more than once with no problem. Chances are, it will work fine for you, too. If not, go to the Ubuntu Support pages and get help. There’s lots of it available, mostly for my favorite price: Free!

A visualization created by IBM of Wikipedia edits.
At multiple terabytes in size, the text and images
of Wikipedia are a classic example of big data.

Freelance CTO Mark A. Herschberg says, “In many cases a company can gain insights from ‘small data.’ Instead of culling through gigs of data take a sample. This can be as simple as picking data from a half dozen days throughout the year or picking every 1000th row of data. If you can get a sample of even a few thousand or tens of thousands of rows of data you can drop it into excel and do some basic data analysis on them. This can be done with just a few SQL statements and a few hours of time.”

Anne Rozinat, co-founder of Fluxicon, suggests learning about Process Mining, and has kindly given us two links to videos (Video One; Video Two) that explain the concept better than we can here in a few words. The point here is that process mining, done correctly, only requires generic PCs or servers that you already have, not specialized machines or costly supercomputer time. This technique is absolutely worth checking out if you are analyzing processes rather than discrete event or item characteristics.

Josh Farkas, founder of Cubicle Ninjas, says, “I feel that the shift from big data to small data in consumable chunks has already occurred, and that small businesses may have the upper hand.

“The enterprise has long had the data advantage, but the birth of small business software as a service was a game-changer. Many small businesses manage this data better because of the more robust web functionality available today.

“Touch interfaces have actually helped this trend too. Interfaces are expected to be clear, intuitive, and a pleasure to interact with. Because of this, big data can be refined more elegantly to just your most pressing bits.”

David Smith, VP of Marketing and Community for Revolution Analytics, contributes these suggestions:

• Start with flat files. There are definite performance and administration benefits to working with a database, Hadoop, or other data management systems, but you’d be surprised at the insights you can find in a simple comma-separated data file exported from your web server or CRM system. These flat files can still be very large (millions or even billions of rows), but that doesn’t mean they’re unmanageable.
• Use open source tools: There are many excellent tools available that work with flat ASCII files available free of charge. From simple tools like “grep” to more powerful data-processing languages, many of your data-processing needs can be met with open-source solutions.
• Predictive modeling with R: If you’re looking to predict the future rather than just summarize the past, the R language is also open-source and includes every predictive modeling algorithm you’d ever need.
• Get some help: While these approaches are powerful and inexpensive, they’re also not for the faint-of-heart: think coding, not pointing-and-clicking. You’ll need someone with the necessary expertise to help, but fortunately there now many graduate programs in Data Science which provide new jobseekers with skills in data management, open source tools and predictive analytics

.

“On the downside,” David notes, “while these ad-hoc approaches will give you useful information about your business at a snapshot in time, they don’t necessary lend themselves to automated production systems that can provide a real-time dashboard for your business. But even these simple steps can give SMBs enough guidance to improve their bottom lines and upgrade to production-ready Big Data systems.”

And finally, we have this statement from Rachel Delacour, CEO and cofounder of BIME:

• No doubt, Big Data has become an overused term to lump together too many technologies, tools and terabytes that defy easy categorization or simply evoke images of the information deluge. But 2013 will make one thing abundantly clear: Every single business has to cope with this new data-driven world in which data is a currency, an asset and a liability. It all depends on how you tackle it and turn it into something immediately valuable. Instead of falling for analysts and vendors who tout the really big thing, more organizations will start thinking small data in 2013, particularly if they are an SMB.

  Here’s why: Big Data starts with a single consumer, a single sensor, a single transaction or a single click. It all flows from here, and the sooner a company picks up on those tremors, the better their read on the earthquake that may be coming. So the best way to think about Big Data is to think about its sources. Don’t become paralyzed by the size of the entire datasphere and instead focus on three simple questions: What types of data do I have? What new types of data can I access thanks to the Net? And what new questions can I keep asking to improve my business? Asking them is almost free. Tools in the cloud let every small explore data and get answers, fast and affordable.

46 experts responded to my online query, “Can cutting ‘big data’ down to ‘small data’ save money?” They all agreed that Big Data can easily get out of hand, and that there are many ways to cut big data down to a size that is affordable and useful for even the smallest business. Today we’ve looked at a small selection of the answers we got. Please stay tuned to Cheap Computing. We’ll run more responses to our “Big Data” question in the near future, and will also be asking our experts many more questions about how you can save money on your home and business IT needs.

Not long after that, with Android grabbing a growing share of the smart phone market, you needed not one, but two apps.

Or you can do as Future PLC has done with their new iPad magazine, tech. That’s right. A magazine strictly for iPad users. Not even the more numerous iPhone people are supposed to read it. And the far, far more numerous Android people? We certainly won’t bother with them, say the iSnobs at tech magazine.

This is obviously an ultra-niche publication. It’s going to have to get a ferocious ad rate to stay in business, because its potential audience is such a tiny percentage of mobile device users.

If you are already in a niche market, either geographically or because you appeal to a limited set of interests, can you afford to ignore 68% of mobile phone users in favor of the elite 19% who have iPhones? Or vice versa?

Forget Mobile Apps. Make a Mobile Website!

Once upon a time there were online services such as Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL. Each one required special software. Each one charged a monthly fee. None of them could communicate with the other ones; if you were on AOL you couldn’t send messages to friends on GeniE or CompuServe.

Then came the Internet. It had been around, but not open to ordinary people. After it opened up, instead of advertising your business on CompuServe or paying for a page on Prodigy, you made a website — and everybody, no matter what ISP they used, could see it.

The general movement of the Internet is toward more standardization, not less. Custom mobile phone apps are a move in the opposite direction. But it is a move that will not last. Why not? Because, if you can deliver your information or sell your wares to all mobile users with a single mobile version of your website, why would you want to spend money on multiple custom apps for multiple mobile operating systems?

There are many services that will help you convert a regular website into a mobile one, none of which cost anything near as much as a custom mobile app, let alone multiple ones so that your site will work for all mobile phone and tablet users, no matter what operating system they run.

I was happy to activate the new phone on my own via the Virgin Mobile website, but I mistakenly clicked a button for “activate” instead of for “switch my number.” Whoops!

I looked around for a way to undo my mistake, and kept getting told to call Virgin Mobile at 1-888-322-1122. So I called. And got stuck in an endless maze of voice menus, none of which held a solution to my problem. Being an American, I started punching “0″ while yealling, “Human!” at the recorded voice. And yelling “Operator!” Then I stated screaming obscenities at the phone, and after about eight minutes of that, I was connected to a person.

And the person not only failed to help me, but was hard to understand and, somehow, managed to switch me from the $35/month plan I’d signed up for (and paid for) to a $45/month plan, so that when I tried to make a call, my new phone still didn’t work because, it said, I had a zero balance in my account. Grrr….

I called again. Same insanity getting an actual human to answer, and once again a human in The Philippines, but this one was so flirty that if I wasn’t married, I would have asked for her home number. She was no more able to get my old cell number switched over than the first one, though. She put me on hold, where I waited and waited.

At least I have (as you probably do, too) a speakerphone, so I could set the handset down and do some computer work while waiting. Which I did. And when the phone call dropped… anyway, I called back. Screamed until I got another nice young lady, although this one was extremely hard to understand, and didn’t seem to have the slightest idea what I wanted, namely to have a working phone on the $35/month plan I wanted all along.

I could hear a male voice (a trainer?) behind the operator’s, and eventually I was told that I needed to get my account number from my previous cellular provider before they could move the phone number over.

Interesting. The prior provider only used my phone number, as far as I knew. In 5+ years, I never knew I *had* a separate account number. I called the old company’s customer service number. I don’t believe I had ever called it before. But guess what? Endless voice menus, none of which had an option for “retrieve account number.” So I screamed obscenities, and eventually I got a human (after a long period listening to a recording that said they were experiencing a heavier-than-usual call volume, I’d have a long wait, etc.) who gave me the account number.

Another call to Virgin. Fine. Screamed obscenities until I got a human. It was a Filipino girl I could understand. But she didn’t understand my problem with the $45/month charge vs. $35/month, and said she’d need to get a supervisor, could I please wait on hold, it will only be a minute, sir?

Except that after about 15 minutes on hold, it was midnight, and that’s when they close down, so I was cut off.

Note that at this point I have spent at least two hours on the phone, and my new Android phone is still not activated. I am not happy.

So I turn to Facebook and leave a nasty message on Virgin’s Facebook page. And a nasty message about #VirginModbile on Twitter. I had emailed after the first fruitless phone call, but had not gotten a response, so I did not try another email.

At this point, I was no longer a pissed off customer, but a journalist doing research. If I was going to go through all this irritation, at least, I figured, I ought to get paid for it.

And I learned something: that there is a crew of Virgin Mobile people they term “Virgin Angels” who monitor Facebook and Twitter and solve problems for upset customers.

Well, well, well. If I had known that in the first place, I could have saved myself a whole lot of irritation and frustration. And gotten a working phone a lot sooner, too.

So now you know this, and you know how to get customer service from Virgin Mobile without listening to useless phone recordings or being on endless hold. And in the end, thanks to help from two Virgin Angels, all my problems got solved and I even got a month’s credit for my trouble. Nice!

But what if you’re calling someone other than Virgin Mobile?

What you need to do, before making a customer service or tech support call is go to the GetHuman website and see what they say is the best way to get service or support from the company you need it from. There are other, similar websites, but none of the ones I tried came anything close to GetHuman, which had not just unpublished company phone numbers and tricks to bypass the awful voice menus that make us all so angry. (The trick for Virgin Mobile is to say “Live adviser” or “It’s something else” when you get a voice prompt)

GetHuman even has free iPhone and Android apps. Or you can just punch GetHuman.com into your Web-equipped phone’s browser and you’ll get a mobile (simpler) version of their site. Very nice!

Please save this advice and pass it on to friends, relatives, and coworkers. The amount of aggravation you save might start an entire new wave of niceness in America — and heaven knows, we could use one!