--Ambrose Bierce

I should be asleep; I'm updating instead; you know the drill.

This all dates back to a money order I sent them back in March for five months of service, after my wallet was stolen the previous November, which resulted in the stopping of the credit card that had been paying the bill until then. Said money order was never properly recorded, and while I had supposedly cleared the whole thing up several times over the past few months, dealing with at least two different people along the way, it turned out that the error was never properly corrected. Instead, it was compounded by another payment they never recorded, this time by credit card...

The upshot of all this is that, on Saturday, they looked over their books, saw that I supposedly hadn't paid since last November, and wiped out my account without any warning.

Phone calls, a visit in person, and another phone call all followed, and the upshot is that supposedly the whole thing is cleared up for real this time (I spoke to the guy who runs the ISP, who incidentally assured me that the guy I'd been dealing with most of the way until now has been fired), but that their mail backup had already been overwritten, so my entire Inbox is history. As in, all the mail I got since the start of April. 3000+ messages. Gone.

I am seriously not happy about this.

(I usually download my mail after about two months, but, well, things have been busy, and I didn't get around to it. That'll show me, I guess.)

My sent-mail for the past few months is gone also, along with sundry other files, but supposedly that's on a seperate backup, and I should be able to get that stuff back. I hope. I'll be calling about that again tomorrow.

Anyway, if you tried to send me mail on Saturday, I didn't get it, as you probably know, 'cause the "bounce" message was pretty emphatic. If you sent me mail really late Friday, I probably didn't see that either. If it happens to be convenient to forward anything you've written me since April, I'd actually appreciate that, but if it's at all burdensome, I wouldn't bother. (In Pine, it'd just be a few keystrokes per mailbox, if you have the aggregate command set enabled and know your way around it. Anything more complicated than that qualifies as "burdensome," I figure.)

Sorry about this. The address found on this site is now the best one to use; as of late Saturday night, it's been set to redirect mail to my college account, rather than the one that's been my primary account until now. Said primary account will be gone for good at the end of September, as I've signed up for a Web hosting account at the same ISP, and have paid for a year's worth of service in advance. (Perhaps not my brightest move, in hindsight, as now I'm not sure how I'm gonna cover the rent in two weeks... but let's handle one crisis at a time, shall we?) This entire site should be moving to said new account once that gets set up...

This switch will remove my dialup access at said ISP, but that hasn't worked consistently in months; I've resorted to a stable of free-with-banner providers instead. I'm not thrilled with those, but on my budget, I'm in no position to complain.