Sometimes its good to be out of touch (06/12/07)

Who knew life was ever going to get this complicated?

Who knew technology was going to intrude in so many ways?

Who knew we'd ever have multiple e-mail addresses and have trouble keeping things straight?

We've been changing e-mail addresses at our house, and it's been anything but simple.

Years ago - although not that many years ago when you stop to think about it- we had our first e-mail address, a dial-up account.

That worked fine, though surfing the Web could be painfully slow.

Then we switched to DSL service, which was dramatically faster and remarkably pain free.

Migrating from address one to address two was a pretty simple thing. But as all of us who deal with technology know, nothing is ever simple.

For starters, we had addresses at home and at work, so things could fall between the cracks. And then there was this work I've been doing overseas. Sometimes that involved an e-mail address there, sometimes it meant using a Yahoo address. So things grew more and more complicated.

At one point, I had an e-mail address in Moldova. At another point, I had one in the republic of Georgia.

Inevitably, things got lost and communications broke down. For a long time, the Yahoo address worked best when traveling. (Just for the record, it's [email protected] and is still active. I don't check it often, but it's convenient to have just the same.)

For more than a year, all was good, though messages I needed to get at home tended to go to the shared e-mail address at the office ([email protected]) and those intended for the office showed up at home. It wasn't a technical problem, but a communications problem.

Then, Embarq split off from Sprint in one of those enormously confusing corporate deals, and Earthlink and Embarq decided to get an amicable divorce, or something.

At any rate, I was informed (via e-mail) that we needed to switch our home Earthlink account to Embarq, so that our mail could migrate with us. The steps were easy, up to a point.

Then we hit the Mac wall, the barrier that Mac users tend to run into when dealing with the rest of the computer universe. Long story short, our mail software wouldn't work with Embarq. We could only check e-mail via our Web browser, which is time-consuming and irritating.

Obviously, faced with all this, it was time for a change. So we're now broadband, thanks to a crew from Insight who struggled with our old cable TV lines that dated from the Triad era.

And all should be good.

Except that making sure the new e-mail address gets to the right people takes some doing.

While paging through our address book, I found several names that meant nothing to me. My guess is it would have meant nothing to them to get the new address.

The good news is that we've managed to leave some folks behind.

Ticketmaster, through whom we've purchased baseball tickets a couple of times, no longer sends us e-mails telling us that Three Dog Night is going to be in concert in Vincennes.

Replacements.com, where we were able to find a couple of place settings for our wedding china that dates back to 1971, no longer e-mails us specials on soup tureens.

You get the picture.

The lesson? It's good to be in touch, but sometimes it's good to be out of touch as well.[[In-content Ad]]