As someone who does not have a printer and tries to do as much in the Internet cloud as is possible, I’ve come to rely on certain services. One of those is GMail. It sits at the centre of my world. So when over the last few days I started to notice ‘odd’ behavior I was more than a little discomfitted. As email arrived, GMail seemed to assume that everything was to be considered read. That meant I had no immediate visual cue as to what I need pay attention. If there is such a thing as productivity in what I do then it evaporated.Almost immediately I lost track of what is going on, was unable to find things readily. Basically I was up the proverbial s*&t creek without a paddle.
I found very little to assist other than vague references to old IMAP services. I was not only puzzled but seemingly the only person with the problem. Twitter enquiries yielded nothing until Nick Butler messaged me to say he thought he knew the problem. Nick is the fellow who turned me onto HideMyAss, a very useful service for ex-pats wanting access to BBC iPlayer and the use of a VPN while offshore. What I thought might be a 10-15 minute call turned into a 2 hour slogathon as he guided me through de-coupling every possible service, deleted filters, disabled IMAP (which stopped mail going to my mobile device for a while…eeeek.) Finally we were left with OtherInBox.
OIB is a service that came recommended by someone I trust. It is an otherwise useful service for organizing the various classes of inbound email I receive. Somehow, the service appears to have gone rogue. We could tell by punching up the details of what GMail was accessing and how other services were interacting with the browser.
The point of this story is not that things can go bad. I would be foolish to think otherwise. I have come to rely on some services such that their use is second nature to me. Regardless of issues around GMail’s quirky terms of service, it is my best loved service so to see it going pear shaped in a way that proved really hard to pin down was doubly worrying. Nick has the patience of a saint. Not once did he go ‘Gaaaaaaah’ as I surely would have and neither did he give in. Giving his time in this way is well beyond generous. It exemplifies all that’s best in people. I’m sure Nick doesn’t need another career in call centre support but if he offers to lend a hand then be doubly grateful.
Could we say the same about the commercial call centers we sometimes need to use? More on that in my next post.
In the meantime – thanks Nick. I won’t forget. I feel privileged to have pals such as you.
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