Friday, February 24, 2006

Life's little annoyances

A sore throat indicating a cold coming on, a flat tire, a broken plate, the heel of your shoe coming off. Life is just full of these little annoyances that rarely are life threatening but sometimes gang up on you and make you feel like you're being pecked to death by a gang of ducks.

We just experienced the high tech version of this annoyance level when our Internet Provider decided that our IP address (whatever that is) should be blocked, at least as far as sending out e-mail. Well, technically they didn't decide that. Some SPAM blocking service they subscribe to decided that and put us on some sort of blacklist. Thus, we could use the Internet and even receive and send email using the web tool our provider provides. But we couldn't use Outlook which we have become attached to.

No longer could easily reply to email and include the message we were responding to. No longer could we access our large database of email addresses to send messages to people who have emailed us in the past three years. No longer could we sort out outgoing messages into folders correlated with our incoming messages. Deadly? No. Frustrating and annoying? You bet.

After ONLY a week, Surewest finanlly figured out what to do about the problem we had reported. After ONLY a week and repeated assurances that we have virus protection and regularly update it, Surewest was able to get out address off the blacklist so that once again we can enjoy the benefit of using Outlook to process our email. Do you ever get the feeling that we're being "protected" right out of lives?

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