You all know that I write when I’m inspired and I can’t write when I’m not. When I send these out, my Outlook Express “Group” is Sunday E-Mails, but I’m not always inspired on Sunday and today isn’t Sunday, so maybe I’ll have to change the group name. That sounds really easy, but I’ve had trouble keeping up with technology lately, so I’m not sure I can.
A couple of weeks ago, Robin from Pierce Cedar Creek Institute called me and said she had sent a couple of e-mails telling me the investment reports were there and I could come out anytime to do the monthly spreadsheets. I told her I hadn’t received the e-mails but I’d be happy to come out the next day, which I did. After finishing, I asked her to send me another e-mail and I would check it when I got home. No e-mail! I seemed to be getting most of my usual ones and Robin had sent me e-mails each month in the past with no problem. I had her send one to Jean and that didn’t come through either, so I thought the problem was on her end.
I was at a meeting the other morning, and the CEO of the hospital said she had sent me some important updates by e-mail. I had checked my e-mail late in the evening the night before and I hadn’t received them. I checked again when I got home and still no e-mails. I worked with Vickie, Sheryl’s administrative assistant for an hour and still no e-mails from either of them.
Here’s where I lose touch! I’ve always used Outlook Express to manage my e-mails and I’ve never had any problems. I checked every setting I could think of and couldn’t find how they were getting blocked. I had still been getting what I considered my normal e-mails but I haven’t gotten much in the way of spam since I switched from voyager to sbcglobal. So I went to the sbcglobal website to see if there was anything there I could check. To my amazement, my “bulk folder” had 17 messages being held. Once a message has been in there for 30 days, it is purged unless I do something with it first.
In the group of messages were 6 from Robin at Pierce, 7 from Sheryl and Vickie at Pennock, 1 from my friend Ruth in Mississippi, 1 from my son Matt in San Francisco and 2 from Road Runner Sports. I spent half a day yesterday responding to what was there if I needed to, trying to let people know I hadn’t ignored them. I’ve been getting weekly e-mails from a company that I bought a hard drive from a few weeks back, weekly e-mails from Northern Brewer telling me what beer supplies are on special, periodic e-mails from Ernie and Barb passing on cute jokes they get from who knows where, and my weekly updates from Congressman Vern Ehlers on what isn’t happening in politics. So why would sbcglobal put the ones in “bulk” that they did?
I’m so frustrated with our federal government sending billions of dollars to a country (Iraq) that doesn’t want us there but can’t find enough money to cover kids with health insurance, taunting another oil rich country (Iran) so the price of oil goes through the roof again, our state government for, again, not being able to agree on a budget for purely political reasons, and on and on, that I’ve become cynical about most everything “big brother” is doing to HELP us. So I believe that sbcglobal has done this so that I’ll get away from using Outlook Express and start using AT&T Yahoo to manage my e-mails. That way I can spend more of my time trying to close the advertising banners that keep popping up since I’m retired and don’t have anything else to do anyway. It’s a good thing my doctor isn’t here checking my blood pressure ‘cuz he’d have me on meds faster than the blink of an eye.
If that isn’t enough, Jean ran out of ink in her printer some months back so she hasn’t been able to print anything. She has a Dell printer that I got “free” when I bought the computer. You can only get the cartridges from Dell and they’re expensive so, naturally, Jean wouldn’t spend the money. She was finally going to order some the other day when I told her to wait. I figured all I had to do was buy a network cable, hook our two computers together, and she could share my printer. Easy, right? Wrong!! I bought the cable, hooked the two printers together, ran the set-up program on each of our computers, clicked on the toggle to share my printer, and then tried to print something on my printer from Jean’s computer. Nothing!!
I’ve done everything I can think of and I’ve done what the programs have told me to do. I can print something from my computer to Jean’s printer, but that one doesn’t have any ink so that’s useless. I can search from my computer and find Jean’s printer, but when I search from her’s to find my printer, it can’t recognize it as a printer. Frustrating!! I’d say something like “I must have been born fifty years too late”, but that would mean I’d be dead by now and I’d have whined fifty years ago about not being able to get used to those new fangled radios with moving pictures they call televisions.
Just (Still Getting Dumber By The Day) JackÂ