Armageddon...
What a day!
I woke up ill this morning (I won't go into details), on top of miserable because the large Acer monitor I bought yesterday wouldn't work with either of my Acer laptops, and Googling had shown me that a) it seemed to be a common problem, b) nobody seemed to have found a cure for it, and because c) I'd already pulled off all the protective plastic, and wasn't sure how I was going to get it back into the box to return it to Argos...
After a bit of um-ing and ah-ing, I decided I was too ill to go in to work. (It's 10 hours of travel by road, tram, rail, tube and foot, which just isn't compatible with an upset stomach ;-)
At about the same time, I discovered that because the company that has been hosting my beloved website for the last fourteen months (having bought the business from my original small hosting company) had migrated it to their own servers yesterday, I couldn't access my email accounts. And, because they don't accept telephone support calls, and I had no email, there was nothing I could do about it!
Cue lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Eventually, I phoned Acer support and tried to persuade them that, since £70 is not a trivial sum, they were morally obliged to help me get the monitor working. They said that although the monitor was brand new, both computers were out of Warranty, and the fault lay with the computers, so tough. But they gave me the phone number of a company that provides support for their out-of-warranty machines.
As I hung up, my phone died.
Poo.
I put it back in its cradle, and after 15 minutes or so, it beeped and seemed to be working again so, not expecting much, I phoned the number.
The man who answered had no idea what I was talking about, but he put me through to one of their technical people, who couldn't remember how to 'do it' on XP, but promised to call me back. And did. Not once, but twice and, together, we got it working!
On a roll, I decided to contact my hosting company via their Sales line. The woman who answered pointed out that they didn't take support calls but, when I explained that I had no email because of the migration, she took my number and promised to get someone to call me back.
At that point I panicked, because this company's customer support record (with me) was not impressive. And, being a wuss, I'll put up with almost anything, even bad customer service, provided I know I can talk to someone on the phone.
So I found myself a new hosting company (recommended by my brother), with at least two guys who answer the phone immediately, and seem happy to answer all sorts of (foolish) questions. I paid for a year, and started uploading my site. However, I still needed to contact the original hosting company to get the domain switched over to the new servers, and I was just wondering how to do that when they called me back.
And the guy was not only very helpful, giving me temporary direct access to their mail server, he also explained that for fourteen months they haven't been charging me for hosting the site (and I'm so ditzy I hadn't realised).
So now I feel guilty. With a capital G. But it's too late to back out.
Other than that, the only problem -- and the real point of this post -- is that, because I've always used a web interface to access my emails, I've lost my entire email archive, including everybody's email addresses, and my website mailing list :-(
But I suppose that's a small price to pay.
My new email address, btw, is the same as the old one, so you can still contact me, should you want to!
I woke up ill this morning (I won't go into details), on top of miserable because the large Acer monitor I bought yesterday wouldn't work with either of my Acer laptops, and Googling had shown me that a) it seemed to be a common problem, b) nobody seemed to have found a cure for it, and because c) I'd already pulled off all the protective plastic, and wasn't sure how I was going to get it back into the box to return it to Argos...
After a bit of um-ing and ah-ing, I decided I was too ill to go in to work. (It's 10 hours of travel by road, tram, rail, tube and foot, which just isn't compatible with an upset stomach ;-)
At about the same time, I discovered that because the company that has been hosting my beloved website for the last fourteen months (having bought the business from my original small hosting company) had migrated it to their own servers yesterday, I couldn't access my email accounts. And, because they don't accept telephone support calls, and I had no email, there was nothing I could do about it!
Cue lots of wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Eventually, I phoned Acer support and tried to persuade them that, since £70 is not a trivial sum, they were morally obliged to help me get the monitor working. They said that although the monitor was brand new, both computers were out of Warranty, and the fault lay with the computers, so tough. But they gave me the phone number of a company that provides support for their out-of-warranty machines.
As I hung up, my phone died.
Poo.
I put it back in its cradle, and after 15 minutes or so, it beeped and seemed to be working again so, not expecting much, I phoned the number.
The man who answered had no idea what I was talking about, but he put me through to one of their technical people, who couldn't remember how to 'do it' on XP, but promised to call me back. And did. Not once, but twice and, together, we got it working!
On a roll, I decided to contact my hosting company via their Sales line. The woman who answered pointed out that they didn't take support calls but, when I explained that I had no email because of the migration, she took my number and promised to get someone to call me back.
At that point I panicked, because this company's customer support record (with me) was not impressive. And, being a wuss, I'll put up with almost anything, even bad customer service, provided I know I can talk to someone on the phone.
So I found myself a new hosting company (recommended by my brother), with at least two guys who answer the phone immediately, and seem happy to answer all sorts of (foolish) questions. I paid for a year, and started uploading my site. However, I still needed to contact the original hosting company to get the domain switched over to the new servers, and I was just wondering how to do that when they called me back.
And the guy was not only very helpful, giving me temporary direct access to their mail server, he also explained that for fourteen months they haven't been charging me for hosting the site (and I'm so ditzy I hadn't realised).
So now I feel guilty. With a capital G. But it's too late to back out.
Other than that, the only problem -- and the real point of this post -- is that, because I've always used a web interface to access my emails, I've lost my entire email archive, including everybody's email addresses, and my website mailing list :-(
But I suppose that's a small price to pay.
My new email address, btw, is the same as the old one, so you can still contact me, should you want to!