My email went wonky a couple of weeks ago and nothing was coming to my inbox. I was able to send things out – at least when I clicked the * send * button they seemed to go somewhere.
Not that I have even the foggiest idea of how these computers work. I know that paying my electric bill is somehow important to the process, but beyond that I am lost.
There are a bunch of lights on the front of something called a router and they either flash or they don’t flash. I don’t know what it means if they are on or off anyway, so we just stick a bow on it every Christmas and call it a decoration.
I knew I still had an Internet connection because I was able to surf the Net. But it was obvious I hadn’t gotten any email for the past day or so.
I figured I would try to access my email account by going to the Shaw website and using their browser based access system. But that didn’t work either – it didn’t seem to recognize me when I typed in my password.
I was using a laptop computer that has one of those cameras up above the screen – so I figured that might be the problem – I went to the bathroom and combed my hair and put my dentures in – but that didn’t work. Their computer still didn’t recognize me.
I had to resort to phoning the cable company. It was a quick task – because I had done it so many times over the years I knew the number by heart.
Now before the folks at the Shaw office get into a huff about that last comment, let me be the first to say we’ve been accessing the Internet through the same company for many years now - so we’ve seen the local infrastructure go through a few upgrades and these days the service is much better than it was back in the day.
That’s not to say it couldn’t be better though –my email might have been getting to me for instance.
So I called the tech department he starts asking me questions. First he wanted to confirm who I was. He asked for the street address of the account. I told him, but added that I was working from my home in Midway and not at the Greenwood address right then.
Then he asked me to check to see if the email account still had the correct incoming and outgoing server info registered. “But wait,” he exclaimed! “You are sitting at the actual computer that has the problem aren’t you?”
It was then I realized I had the benefit of an experienced help-desk tech on the other end of the line.
I wonder how many hours have been wasted by people talking on the phone to tech support and typing into the wrong computer trying to make their digital world synch up with the world-wide-web.
What was the diagnosis on the computer?
He said there appeared to be something wrong on their side and he’d put in a priority work order because I was on a business account.
Thirty minutes later my inbox started filling up again. They phoned back the next day to explain what had gone wrong, but I didn’t understand it too well. They used a bunch of technical language - said something appeared to have been “broken on my backend”.