I’ve got a bit of a story that will frustrate just about the most laid back person there is. My Secret to Stress Management is at the bottom, but don’t peek.
‘Round about 3:30 today, my email stops working. Incoming email works fine, but I can’t send anything. At this point, my email can wait and I have other things to do, so I put it off until about 5:30. I would say I am semi-computer literate, so I went into my account settings to make sure all the mail server information was correct, which it was, so I called BellSouth.
‘Round about 3:30 today, my email stops working. Incoming email works fine, but I can’t send anything. At this point, my email can wait and I have other things to do, so I put it off until about 5:30. I would say I am semi-computer literate, so I went into my account settings to make sure all the mail server information was correct, which it was, so I called BellSouth.
Achmar picked up. I explained the situation, and after 15 minutes of having no idea what he is trying to say except “thank you for that information Mr. Graham,’ more times than you can imagine, which happens to be the most annoying phrase in the Indian accent, he lets me know that if I want to use an email address that is anything other than bellsouth.net that it won’t work anyway so I shouldn’t try. That’s funny, I’ve been using my visionmarketdevelopment.com email address for weeks just fine.
So I call Register.com. Angela D. answers! SHE SPEAKS ENGLISH CORRECTLY!! YAY!! Unfortunately, she lets me know that “sometimes BellSouth blocks the register.com email servers so that you have to use theirs.” This seemed super-duper odd, but she’s in the industry so I figure she knows. I must call BellSouth again and get their outgoing mail server to put in Outlook instead of the register.com outgoing mail server. This should fix the problem.
SURPRISE! This doesn’t fix the problem. So I ask the guy at BellSouth what I should do. He says, “why don’t you just use the bellsouth.net email?”
“Are you kidding?”
“It is very good email.”
“but bellsouth is not the name of my company.”
“yes, we are bellsouth.”
“I’m painfully aware. I don’t want to use a bellsouth.net email address.”
“Why not?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Well if you use bellsouth.net email, it should work.”
“But I want my other email address to work. How do we make that happen.”
We spend the next 30 minutes are so doing things that I have already done until he finally decides that it is not an issue with BellSouth, but an issue with Register.com and I’ll need to call them back. Next, I get Sparky, the 19 year old new hire in the register.com helpdesk.
I explain the situation to Sparky and he asks if I typed my password in. “For Joy!! THE PASSWORD! How could I forget?” Of course it’s not the password. My email was working at 3pm and then wasn’t working at 3:30. You think my password left the country, Sparky? Ridiculous. So he puts me on hold and when he comes back, he says that he talked to his supervision who says it is an issue with my POP3 settings, but he can’t go over that with me on the phone. He’ll have to email it to me. I thought I had done all that, but let’s find out.
Turns out that I had already done EVERYTHING in that email multiple times.
So I call back and the next guy I get says, “Oh yeah, one of our mail servers lost power. It should be back up within the hour.”
How is this not the FIRST thing I was told??
Anyway, The Secret to Stress Management is…”Who Cares. If it won’t matter in 5 years, it doesn’t matter now.”
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