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November 3, 2015

As I write this, it has been just over seven days since my personal email account stopped working. My email account at work is still running, so I can’t say I’ve gone a whole week without any email at all. But I do a good job of keeping my personal and work email separate from each other, so it’s a drought that has not gone unnoticed by my friends and various vendors, who are getting all their emails to me bounced back.

The most distressing thing to me about this situation, besides not getting my daily Daf Yomi email, is the thought of all the email lists I’m on, and want to stay on, that are cancelling me from their e-blasts. I imagine I may have trouble signing up again for some of them, now that they have my email listed as no good any more. I suppose the flip side of this issue is I will probably get less spam in the future.

The second most distressing thing is not knowing who may be trying to get in touch with me without being able to do so. They may not have my phone number or physical address; email may be the only way they have to get in touch with me.

The third most distressing thing is I’ve lost access to my email address book as part of this, so there are people I can’t contact, even if I wanted to. For instance, it briefly looked like I might have to reschedule a visit to an elderly person this weekend, but without my email addresses I don’t know how to contact his daughter to tell her I need to do so.

The fourth most distressing thing is not knowing what stuff I’m missing out on because I’m not getting the email telling me about it. Have the dates and times of any events I’m planning to attend been changed? Has anything new been added?

The fifth most distressing thing is I can’t sign up for new stuff. There are a couple of things I wanted to do in the past week, but I thought, “I need to use an email address to do that, but my current email address doesn’t work, and I don’t want to use my work email for this.”

All of this adds up to a low level of discomfort with which I have lived for the past week. Five calls to my service provider have not yet yielded a solution. They do agree this situation should not have arisen, they do agree that they should have had it fixed by now, they do assure me that when they get it working again all of my email history and such will still be there, but so far, none of this harmonious perspective on the problem has resulted in an actual solution.

I am quite proud of myself for not asking the nice service provider call agent today, “God created the world and everything in it in six days, why can you not reinstate my email in seven?”

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