Un-Linked (In)

Disconnected.

Disgruntled.

It's not the X-mas blues. I'm feeling fairly connected to those who matter in my life, other than geographically. 1800 miles of (choose one) snowy, icy, cold, crowded roads, or long lines and all the airport hassles just to arrive quicker in the land of cold, icy, snowy. And darker too. It doesn't seem like much, but winter days are longer down here. But, I'm not seeing old friends, family, the new youngsters who have arrived. Pictures and videos are great. But hugs are better.

Still, I (we) choose to be here, avoiding all the snow and ice, slipping and sliding, and the sub-zero air that rips your breath right out of your lungs. There are, after all, friends here too. Mobility is easier. Fewer layers are needed for survival, and we can concern ourselves with comfort instead.

E-communication has hit a couple of snags lately, however. Both are connected in some way to email. Let's start with the idea that I've had my same email address for ages. It's the first and only one I've had. It dates back to joining with the landline company that served our house, part of a package. Even after dropping the landline in favor of everybody having their own cell phones, the email stayed the same.

Now you know I've been steadfast about avoiding Facebook. I did decide, however, that I'd give Linked-In a shot. Not sure why. Maybe I just thought somebody ought to be able to find me if they wanted to and weren't up to Googling me to figure out I do a blog. Yep, they're out there. Not you, of course. By definition.

A couple of months ago I thought it was about time to go in and change my profile to "retired". Practically every day I get email notices of however many thousand jobs I might qualify for in the twin city area. No longer interested, thanks. I wasn't allowed access to my own account.

You might think, "Oh shucks, who cares? It's just another 20 junk emails a month, no action needed." Hey, "delete" is simple, right? Of course, on top of those, I keep getting notices that Matt Dunham has added something to his profile and I should go check it out. It might be a new person I don't know. Or skill. Or a thought. Folks get them, you know. But I can't get in.

Then there are the reminders that somebody wants to connect with me. Not being able to read minds, I'm just guessing that my ongoing failure to connect with them is seen as some kind of rejection. I don't care about the friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, but occasionally there is a name I recognize.

Really, I'm not snubbing you. Retired or not, we could exchange "Howdys". But if I try to connect with anybody, I have to log in. With my email address. And each time I get this nasty little message that I can't do that because their platform no longer supports my email provider.

Of course, they have no problem reaching me on my email. Depending on how busy Matt Dunham has been lately, it could be 40 times a month or more. And those invites still come rolling in. Now I'm the one getting frustrated. I finally decided to just pull out of Linked-In. But, of course, guess what? I have to log in with my email address but I'm automatically rejected due to... my email address.

Hey, guys, I'm not changing it!!!

Of course, last week my email company did something very unfriendly and won't let me log into my email any more. It seems they've combined with Yahoo. My little "mail" icon with the cute stamp no longer connects me to anything. I called the company.

Have you ever tried to call a company to help fix a problem, and before they'll talk to you, even to maybe send you on to the department that can actually help you, they need your account number or some other kind of jargon number? Perhaps it's not a problem for you. You can breeze in and out of your operating system, go right to the part of its history that keeps track of all that stuff, and come up with the exact sequence of digits from, say, three machines and 15 years ago.

Good for you! No, seriously, good for you! I can't do that. I wouldn't begin to know where to look or recognize it if I found it. Way back in the olden days, so long ago that folks still knew what floppy discs were, maybe just after you still had to know DOS to do anything and email was still messing its diapers, I had my email set up... by my web guru son-in-law. Who, it turns out,  is still both my son-in-law and a web guru, but has made the questionable decision of still living 1800 miles away in the land of snow and ice. It's not like I can turn the laptop over to him in his spare time so he can take 30 seconds to do what I can't in 6 months.

I don't have a number, a code, any memory of what that dusty old password may have been. Their voicemail robot insisted on one or another. I spent about 20 minutes finding the miracle that could get me to tech support without knowing the required information. Look, I knew tech support wasn't where I needed to be, but I figured any human....

Nope. Not an improvement. Hiding behind that Asian accent was a script. She was not programmed to deviate. There were a lot of "Yes, I feel you..." comments, but no matter what, she kept coming back to needing what I didn't have in order to figure out where to send me. Scratch that: she simply wasn't capable of sorting through enough English to say anything that didn't start with, "but I need your...."

Did she have a manager? Those words she understood. The manager was on another phone call. But she could help me herself if I could just give her.... There must have been a true X-mas miracle, because after 10 minutes of this runaround, the manager finally finished her phone call, and I could talk to her. I just had to be put on hold for a couple more minutes.

I'm guessing those minutes were taken up in transferring my call back around to an English-speaking part of the world. No accent. Full vocabulary. Able to converse off-script. Didn't need any numbers, passwords, gobbledygook. Just my name.

JUST MY NAME!

Boy, was it a good thing she was both knowledgeable and patient. There followed a good half hour conversation. We went into my mail through Google, so it's now accessible with a bookmark. Suddenly I was looking at my spam du jour. Where was the rest of my email? All the stuff I'd archived? Pictures? Addresses? Jokes? I was assured it was coming. And all this was now in a Yahoo format, which meant a very long tutorial, followed by lots of exploration, trial and a gazillion errors, and a system I still don't know how to use well.

There has been some progress. Once the emails appeared, they included everything I'd ever gotten back to 2012. No, seriously, I mean 2012! So the first thing I had to do was sort through and delete. That included stuff I already deleted and threw out in the trash. Along the way, I learned how to save pictures. I still have no clue where they are saved, but my machine assures me they are, and in my roaming I actually saw a compilation of pictures sorted by date received. So, somewhere.

I'll look later. I'm still deleting.

Now that's a fun process in itself. I've gotten so I can whip through certain headings. Amazon and eBay are each good for about 5 emails for each purchase, or maybe just 4 if I've been watching something without buying. Then there's PayPal if I did buy, followed your-order-was-received/paid/shipped and a reminder to give feedback. We've already discussed Linked-In. Motels think I like to travel more than 2x a year, car companies think I need a new one, anybody I've bought from is generally good for a dozen ads a month. Somehow those "unsubscribe" links don't work perfectly either. (On the plus side, I no longer get those ads to improve body parts I never had, and Nigerian princes have lost interest.)

Simple navigation around the page was a learning process. Gone is click-and-drag. I LOVE click-and-drag. Arrowing and returning create havoc, and I discovered that my mousepad has both one finger and two finger functions in addition to left, right, and bottom corner touches. My window grows and shrinks, shifts around, and sometimes needs a complete shutdown and reboot before I can proceed.

Necessity has greatly aided the culling process. Emails I wanted to save for posterity - cartoons, humor, cute pictures, reminders of how I picked various passwords, family and friend news, account numbers for paying taxes, photos, etc. - haven't found their way into folders yet, so many of them are gone. And I mean "gone" gone. There are folders tucked along a vertical toolbar with terms like inbox, spam, draft. Familiar enough, right? There are also counters next to the titles. I started out with over 2000 "new" emails, and that number drops a bit with deletions. Just not as fast as I hit the delete button. Just to keep it even, the number by the trash folder climbs, but again not as fast as I hit that delete button. By the time the delete folder claims it holds 200 emails, the system starts slowing way down. Time to empty the trash. The 200 it claims to hold magically becomes, say, 278 while it's in the emptying process. And the inbox hasn't gone down by either amount. At least the system works at a decent speed again.

I've been working at this for two days now. This much I've gotten good at. I'm somewhere near the beginning of 2017. I've no earthly idea how much is left to do. I do know, however, my inbox claims there are 22 items in it. It's said that for the last 250 items I've deleted. I have no earthly idea how that number was arrived at, how many are still in the system, where the archived ones are being held or how to put things into whatever folder. It looks like I may have the answers sometime next year.

I also know that at one point in the deleting process, it suddenly skipped a month or so worth of emails. I just can't remember exactly where that happened. If I try to scroll through to locate stuff for a second look, it jumps again.

Maybe it's about as happy with me as I am with it.