BACK IN THE SADDLE AGAIN

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.