Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Passwords, Email and Icons... Oh My!


It's been one of those days! You know, where you sit at your laptop going crazy?

It all started with aol. Back in the days when I was a brand new computer user, I signed up with aol to start an email account. I used aol for several years then suddenly my account froze up. It wouldn't recognize me anymore, and I was no longer able to sign on. Oh yes, I investigated. I went on many aol sites and tried calling a lot of phone numbers and talked to a lot of machines. I even visited the Genius Bar at the Apple store... even they couldn't figure it out! So I gave up and opened a gmail acccount and everything has been fine since. As far as I know, though, the aol account is still out there somewhere in the ether, and unread messages are piling up in some unknown place.

Gmail is working fine. The only problem is, I had already used my aol address to set up my Blogger account, my eBay account and my PayPal account. I figured it might cause some problems somewhere along the line, but I would cross that bridge when I came to it. Well, this morning, I had to cross that bridge. I decided to start selling stuff on eBay. I had to re-enter my user ID and my password... then my email address!! Could I still use my aol address? I didn't think so. What if someone had to reach me about an item? Maybe I couldn't get paid without a working email address. That meant I had to change my email address with both eBay and PayPal!

I figured out how to change my email address on eBay. But then, eBay would not let me sign on to my account. I called several phone numbers and talked to several machines. FINALLY I got to a young lady on the phone. She helped me straighten it all out. I had to empty my cache and erase all my cookies. Then I had to change my email address on PayPal.

But I still haven't figured out how to change my email address on Blogger. I think I will leave that for another day. So, if some day when I go silent, you will know that my old email address has finally done me in!

Whew! I wonder if anyone has read this far... sorry for rambling.

2 comments:

rachel said...

My experience is that you will NEVER be allowed to change your email address in Blogger! I still have to use a very old Yahoo address. It's not the most intuitive service. And like you, I suspect that somewhere in the virtual postbox, many unread emails sent to my old e-address sit, waiting in the dark....

Still a thing of wonder, though, all this technology, isn't it!

judy in ky said...

A thing of wonder, yes... and a source of many mysteries for me.