January 13, 2002

Welcome to Wyndspirit Dreams! I was going through my quotes looking for something special about change, planning to write some more about all the changes that have been going on in my life, but when I found this one, I was reminded of a customer I dealt with at work Friday night.

I had spoken with this customer the week before on the exact same issue. We are migrating our residential customers to another ISP because of some agreement between the Powers That Be. This customer had migrated his account, but for some reason had been unable to set up e-mail forwarding. The migration was completed and his old account was disabled. Because the account has been disabled, there is no way for anybody to get in to access it to forward the e-mail to his new address. This gentleman has been escalated to every conceivable department from the business office to a team specializing in migration issues, and the consensus is, there is nothing anybody can do. However, his e-mail continues to accumulate on the server, because the account isn’t actually closed.

The customer calls in almost daily, spends hours on the phone complaining and arguing with us. He has us go through the mail on the server piece by piece, deleting all the junk mail but saving the mail he wants to see someday, never mind that we have all told him that he will never get that e-mail. He has several subscriptions, but personal e-mail from only three or four parties. It would take him half an hour to notify everybody of his new e-mail address and resubscribe to his e-mail lists. Rather than do that, he spends hours and hours on the phone with tech support, still determined that somehow, some way, he is going to get that e-mail. It’s not going to happen. When he rehashed the whole sad tale again this Friday night, I was about ready to tell him to get over it and get on with his life.

Nobody likes to have bad things happen. And sometimes things happen that we have no control over. What we do have control over, however, is how we deal with them. The first—and sometimes hardest—thing we need to do is simply accept that it happened. Once you have forced yourself to admit to your innermost self, "This has happened. This is the way things are now," you have a starting point. From there you can go on to analyze your options and find solutions. But until you truly face reality and accept that the problem is there and will not go away, you can’t even start getting it resolved. I wonder how many more weeks this gentleman will keep calling us before he figures that out?