Nothing is more important today than the ability to contact hundreds of friends, relatives and business associates in the blink of an eye with important and often urgent e-mail, text and Twitter tweets.
An example would be: “hv just tried whipped cream cheese on bagel; seems easier 2 spread than more tradtnl “block” of c.cheese. Cost seems about same.”
Recently I took this system of high-tech communication to a new level with the purchase of a so-called “smart phone.” (Mine isn’t the smartest phone, but when it heard Mitt Romney say he didn’t care about 47 percent of Americans, the words “Oh-oh, what a dumb-&%#” appeared on the screen).
Seriously, my iPhone is a fantastic device that allows me to type critical messages about cream cheese AND check the weather in Helsinki AND watch Dr. Phil — all while I am driving through downtown Denver.
But then my world collapsed.
Here you might be thinking, “I bet the wind blew his cardboard refrigerator box out from under the bridge,” and I would say you are wrong. (My box is fine, as is the journalism degree that I have proudly stuck to the rear wall with gum.)
No, my point here, if there is one, is that I no longer have a contact list, that crucial collection of e-mail addresses and phone numbers that form the basis of communication for all of us — except people in West Virginia, where they still seem to get along just fine by tying notes to raccoons.
The whole mess began with an e-mail from a well-known telephone company that I will not mention here, although I will say that it rhymes with “HeyBee&Bee.”
We’d changed credit cards for the automatic monthly payments to HeyBee&Bee and had been billed on that Visa card since April. Now, suddenly, months later, they had tried to bill the old, expired credit card and it was rejected, in part because it did not exist.
“To avoid interruption of your service,” HeyBee&Bee wrote, “valid credit card information” — an example would be the card they’d billed with no problem for four months — “must be received by August 26, 2012.”
So that morning, we called HeyBee&Bee, the communications giant. Someone transferred me to someone else and the line went dead. I called back. Someone transferred me to someone else and the line went dead. My wife called. Someone transferred her to someone else and the line went dead.
Two hours later, we found a person who said we didn’t have an account with them. We said we did, and had, in fact, been customers since 1995. He transferred us to someone else and the line went dead. This went on for two days. No kidding. Then we got a notice that our account had been suspended.
We could, we were told, switch to a Yahoo account and all of our information, including contact lists, would automatically be transferred to the new e-mail account. So we opened a Yahoo account that day.
Guess what didn’t get transferred?
Yahoo said it was the phone company’s fault. The phone company said it was Yahoo’s fault and added that a dog had eaten their homework. We were told if we gave them $7.95, our contact lists could be recovered. The woman also mumbled something that I didn’t understand, although I did catch the words “when,” “monkeys,” “fly” and “a#@.”
So we paid the $7.95 to recover our contact lists. We were told to wait 24 hours — oddly enough the exact same amount of time it takes a West Virginia message raccoon to walk from Nutter Fort to Dunbar.
The 24 hours passed. No contact list. We called and were told by a nice man that there was “nothing more” they could do for us. I told him that the word “more” sounded funny. I was then transferred to someone else and the line went dead.
We are now making phone calls to friends and relatives asking for their e-mail addresses. My contact list is gone. My wife’s contact list is gone, too.
As its motto, the famous phone company went with, “Rethink Possible.” Which, as I understand it, narrowly edged out “At Least Our System Doesn’t Have A Big Tail And Rabies.”
Rich Tosches, a former Denver Post staff writer, also writes for the Colorado Springs Independent.
