In recent tech history, there hasn’t been a more liberating gadget than the USB modem internet dongle.

It’s finally allowed the regular Juan to cut the umbilical internet network cord and wander with his laptop, even way beyond the comfort zone of the wifi router at home and still remain online anywhere. Today’s HDMA speeds practically make this kind of surfing indistinguishable from surfing on a wired connection. The unprecedented freedom it allows us to update our FaceBook page from the backseat of the car in heavy traffic, or amidst the mayhem of the mall food court with near impunity is incredible.

But it’s a double–edged sword; the reasonably equipped 21st century drone now has no more feasible and defensible way to dodge responsibilities. No more excuses. You can write that report your boss is demanding and send it in from the department store’s toilet stall if you had to, thanks to that dongle.

Unless of course you run out of prepaid load, and even if you wanted to reload your account, the service won’t take your money. This highly improbable incident happened to me last week, courtesy of poorly designed customer-service procedures and a dead-end call center setup from one telco.

I got myself a SmartBro dongle soon after the launch of the service at an expensive rate (nearly twice the price today; rates usually plummet soon after launch). Just like a cell phone, you can keep using it as long as it has credit, and you just need to top it off by transferring load at the store, or by buying a card and loading it up.

Last Tuesday, my SmartBro dongle ran out of credit and promptly quit working, which usually happens during times I need it the most, like sending an important file to the boss. No sweat, I thought. I got myself a P500 Smart Buddy card from a store and tried to reload the account from my postpaid Smart number. I got thwarted each time and got a message that the PIN was invalid. Which was ridiculous, because I had just scratched off the backing from the card number with a coin and the grit was still fresh on my desk. Of course it was valid.

So I figured I needed to go call the Simply Amazing World of Smart at 888-1111, go through the tedious button-mashing until I found a human I could talk to. The human I found said the long and short of it was I had to verify the status of the PIN. And to do that I needed to call a different number for Smart Bro – 672-7277.

Fine. With patience, I wade through all the prompts at that number. Many minutes later the robot voice tells me to enter my SmartBro number. I do, then I am told in order to proceed from there, I have to enter my TPIN, or Telephone PIN, and that in the event I did not have one, to please go to the website at http://smart.com.ph/connect, register and make one, then come back and enter my TPIN.

TPIN? WTH? If I could get online to make a TPIN, I wouldn’t be calling them in the first place, would I?

So lemme get it straight: to confirm the status of my load’s PIN so I can l finally load up my account and go online, I first need to go online somehow to their site, make me a TPIN so I could call the number again, sort out my Load PIN’s status from their customer service so I can finally get the account reloaded and get online. It’s the 21st century version of Catch-22, that curious situation of self-defeating logic first described by Joseph Heller.

Before I get hot under the collar I try the saner approach of trying to pin down another human again from the Simply Amazing World of Smart and see if I can explain my dilemma and get somewhere. The number they sent me to was no help, because the predetermined prompts all lead to automated replies and had no human option, so I went back to the first number I called (where I was at least able to talk to a human) to tell them their advice just sent me to one of the outer rings of Hell.

Back at the old number, the new human patiently listens to my predicament, and then cheerfully says I have to verify the PIN status at the SMARTBRO number, (which was what their first advice had been). I tell them (again) where that led me, and why I was back here, so was there any number I could call that wasn’t automated? He puts me on hold for a few minutes and come back and tells me I had to call the SMARTBRO number.

I tell the human about the TPIN problem, and the human says that is the only way to get to the PIN verification portion. Helpfully, he suggests that when I get online to get my TPIN, I could go ahead and check the status of my load from the website, which was one of the convenient features of the site.

Trying not to expire from apoplexy, I ask to be transferred to a supervisor or a manager or the head of their call center or someone that can think for himself and not be confined to a preset page of answers on a computer screen. No, there is no person they could transfer me to from where they were. OK, fine. Did they have the trunkline of the Smart Mothership? Maybe I could call them? No, sir, we can’t give you that number.

Holy crap! I figured it out! I was in an inner Circle now. And apparently, there was nowhere else to go from here. So there I was; an hour wasted on the phone talking with robots and useless humans, with P500 of credit, a laptop and an expensive USB HSPA modem I can’t use, and I still couldn’t get online to send my file to my boss if my life depended on it.

What a brave new world we live in! Simply amazing!