I haven’t blogged in several months … that’s partly because I’ve been busy – with work, a new nephew, campaign design, etc. – but also because my blog ran away from home.
Okay, what really happened is that when I set up my blog I used my work email address as the contact link. At the time I was planning to switch from Neolithic-era dial-up to quasi-modern high-speed internet at home, and I thought that using a soon-to-evaporate personal email account didn’t make much sense. Ironically, six months have come and gone, and I still haven’t switched to high speed internet; I still plan to do so … any day now, really I do … check back with me in a year or two and we’ll see if I’ve managed to carry through on that plan.
So, I used my work email address, and everything worked like a charm. Then, out of the blue, and several years after assigning me “a new and up-to-date” email account, the inscrutable tinker gnomes in our IT department opened and attached new Google accounts to each employee’s email address.
The IT department didn’t consider it worthwhile warning me about this development but all of a sudden I started getting “alert” notifications from Google every time I tried to access my blog – kind of a, “hey buddy, you seem to have a personal Google account with this email address BUT one of our corporate clients also has a Google account with the same address; you need to move your personal crap somewhere else.”
I have to admit that Google “offered” to make the transition really easy. All I needed to do was give them another email address to which they could attach my existing account. [At this point you can go back to paragraph 2 and reread my rationale for using the work email address in the first place.]
So … I needed another, other, email account. Hmmm, I thought, “If I need a new email address to attach to my Google account, why don’t I open a gmail account?” I did some research, didn’t encounter too many ‘nays’, and subsequently opened a gmail account. This had the added benefit that I could correspond with friends and check their responses from work; something I couldn’t really do with my original “home” account.Then I tried “migrating” my inaccessible blog [inaccessible partly because the IT gnomes also changed my Google password when they opened the “new” account for me] from the work email to my new gmail account. That’s when I discovered the curious fact that you can move Google accounts to a new email address as long as that email isn’t gmail. Huh? “Our migration system is designed to work with every existing email account in the world except our own.”
I had to open yet another new gmail account just to regain access to my blog. Arrgh, this is bound to be a continuing issue of confusion to me in the years ahead. At least I can post to my own blog again, so I suppose it’s not all bad.
