Well, here I am again.
Probably most of you think there is nothing remarkable about that fact,
just the Old Philosopher bloviating again. Little do you know. Yesterday, at 8:47 a.m., I posted a brief
report of my return to the United States.
Not a problem. Several hours
later, I undertook to post something further, and was informed by an irritating
little logo that, so far as Google was concerned, I did not have any
blogs. Did I wish to create one? The logo
asked.
There followed a frenzied six hours or so of unsuccessful
efforts to get Google to acknowledge that I did indeed have a blog, indeed two
blogs, and had been posting almost daily for eight years. I called the University of Massachusetts OIT
help desk. They could not help. I called UNC.
No luck. I checked my Southwest
Airlines frequent flier miles and formulated a plan to fly out to Google
headquarters south of San Francisco and throw myself on their mercy. I tried calling every Google regional office
I could find, and discovered, not surprisingly, that I could not talk to a
human being. [Since there are probably only
half a billion people with blogs, I can understand their hesitation. It would take a support force the size of
Pakistan’s population to staff a human help line.]
Then, this morning, I decided to find my way to one of the
UNC walk-in help offices [suitably located right next to the UNC Hospital
Emergency Room], where a lovely young woman agreed to try to help. Ten minutes later, I had recovered my blog
administrative page. I offered her flowers
and candy but she declined. So I told
her that if she ever needed a letter of recommendation, she had but to ask.
Once again, we see that in this new world, the young explain
to the old how things work.
3 comments:
Welcome back to the NC and to your blog!
another small pebble: I donated to the North Carolina Democratic Party.
I don't know why Google can't provide a call center. Phone companies do, and just about everyone has a phone these days. Google makes a lot of money and one of the ways they make even more money is cutting labor costs, not even paying for an outsourced call center in a third-world country.
In fact, the Marxist scholar David Harvey often suggests that one way to unite poor people, working class people, middle class people, and small business people is to organize around the way people are abused and ripped off by internet companies, phone companies and the whole high tech complex.
I am extremely satisfied that you're back on line, Professor.
Please somehow convey your Readers' gratitude to the young expert who helped rocover your access.
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