Give Me Back My Darn Email

Courtesy of Flickr

Courtesy of Flickr

I am not into Twitter. I am only quasi into Facebook.

However, I email regularly. I receive emails all day. It’s no exaggeration to say that I get over 100 emails a day. And that is my personal account.

Sure plenty of them, even the majority are junk emails. No, I don’t need a daily reminder of the sales at Hanes, Jos. A. Bank, and Lands End.

However, there are a number of emails that come through every day that matter. Business, personal. Whatever.

As you can gather, I have come to rely on my email very much.

And why not rely on email?

You can access it from anywhere. You can communicate via email with people anytime and all over the world. Instantly. (By the way, I once received a telegram. It was pretty cool to receive a crinkly piece of paper with a message on it. )

Sure, I know grammar rules are often overlooked which is hard for this English teacher. I realize that there is a breakdown in formality when communicating via email. Tone is difficult to convey other than via use of smiley faces.

I still take email.

So, why do I come to espouse the value of this efficient and effective modern form of communication?

Because one day last week I lost access to my incoming email. And it was an ugly scene.

Let me tell you what I was expecting that day.

  1. Information from a source on an article I was writing.
  2. Instructions from an editor of a proposed article.
  3. Holiday greetings from friends and family.
  4. A yes/no on a proposed meeting.

This was important to me. Not earth shattering, life changing, or career ending.  Just important.

So, I called my email carrier. I was on the phone for over an hour and a half, was put on hold multiple times, and was bounced around to so many different people/departments that a basketball would have gone flat from all the activity

Ultimately, the problem was discovered. Let me tell you what it was. They were unable to collect payment via my credit card.

I have had the same email address and credit card for years. And never had a problem. However, now for some reason they had the wrong number.

Huh? Why? Of course, no one had a clue.

Saturday night, after a three day holiday, I was once again looking to check my email. I was expecting hundreds of email messages.

Instead, I found 0.  It took all the calm I had stored up over the holiday for me to not scream and slam whatever was within arm’s reach.

Another 45 minutes of calls to my email carriers.  And I spoke to someone who was competent and seemed to truly understand the problem. I was able to see the email that had been sent to me over the last three days.

I was happy.

And then I wasn’t.  My folders were no more. My sent email was no more. My contacts were no more.

It was as if I had a new account.

So, back to the phones I went. Uggh.  So much for quick and modern conveniences.

I wonder if this sort of thing ever happened on the pony express.

20 thoughts on “Give Me Back My Darn Email

  1. That does sound horrible! I don’t think that would ever happen with the Pony Express. One of my husband’s favorite movies is Shipping News with Kevin Costner. I don’t care for the movie but because my husband owns it and has watched it 50 times I have seen enough snippets to know that he went to major extremes and danger to make sure that mail got delivered to its rightful place!

  2. Oh my goodness – how very frustrating! I catalog my work emails and it has killed me when I’ve crashed and lost them; however, you’d think that the primary email guys would have massive back ups in place! 🙂 It sure would be nice if you could get all of your old emails and contacts back…. sadly, I bet that is not the case, and this is a problem in our new technological society! I make a point to back up my work stuff to the cloud, but I’m not as good with my personal!

    • Who knew to be in the clouds could ever be so productive?
      Anyway, I try and back up my stuff but I often am lazy about such things. I lose patience.

  3. How seriously annoying, I really hope you manage to get any important information back.
    You have my sympathy when it comes to technology issues, I spend half my day trying to send emails, load posts and well, anything else that needs an internet connection for me to operate it, something that should take minutes ends up taking anything up to an hour. It’s kind of refreshing to know that it’s not just Bulgarian technology that’s frustrating! Good luck and well done for not slamming everything in sight!

  4. There is nothing more frustrating than technology! I’d be in total freak out mode too. All my work and contacts and messages are in my email folders. Hope you get this worked out.
    Ironically, I still haven’t replied to your email yet. I got a new laptop over the weekend and both the old one and new one are at a local repair place to get the data transferred over and to guess what … transfer all my emails. Brought it on sat and it’s still not done. I’ve been ‘working’ for the past two days on jake’s old hand-me-down-laptop and whatever I see coming through on my phone.
    So I get your pain.

  5. I would have had a complete fit! What a mess.

    And when it’s all fixed, you will have 1,000 messages from Lands End. Those people do not know when to stop emailing, I swear.

  6. Ouch! I hope you were able to retrieve those files in the end. I particularly sympathize with the pain of having to phone carrier and all those menus and all that waiting. Best of luck on those emails you were waiting on.

    • Those phone carriers do get on your nerves don’t they.
      On a slightly different note, do you remember the Seinfeld episode where Kramer pretends to be the movie phone guy? Hilarious.

  7. That is so awful! I think I might die (well, no, not literally) if I lost my email. I lost my work email a couple months back. I’m still alive. So I guess it wasn’t that bad. Or maybe I just don’t care as much about work-related communication. And for you to have to spend all that time on the phone trying to figure out the problem…as if losing your email wasn’t enough. I feel terrible for you. 🙁

  8. How very annoying! It often surprises me how much I rely on email, mobile phones and internet access! What would we do without it?!?!

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