by Carrie Classon
For the most part, I congratulate myself on being relatively competent at managing technology. I don’t have an overwhelming fear of learning new apps or platforms and have even caught myself feeling a little smug when others profess terror at the prospect of updating their website or mastering a new program.
All smugness disappeared this week.
I got caught in a technology black hole over a $20 bill. I owed a company $20 for forwarding my email to me. This is something that should have taken less than a minute to resolve. Three days later, I was still battling.
The company was based in India. I won’t bore you with the details of why it was based in India or how this company was chosen (I had plenty of opportunity to question the choice over the last three days), but it has provided excellent service, and I had had no reason to believe it wasn’t a good choice. Until this week.
I couldn’t log in to my account. That was the only problem. They did not have my phone number on record, and the only other means of verifying my account involved changing information in the directory of my website, and I knew — before I even tried — I was in over my head.
(I realize there are tech-savvy folks reading this right now and saying, “How hard could that be?” and I’m sure they are right; it was probably much easier than I imagined, but that does not mean it was not far more difficult than I could manage.)
So I wrote an email. The response I received provided an entirely new set of instructions for how to verify the account. I wrote back asking for clarification. A different tech person replied with an answer that appeared to bear no relation to the question I had asked.
I wrote back with more questions; they dutifully provided replies. Every email was signed by a different employee of this very large tech company in India. Every letter was exceedingly polite — and made not one bit of sense.
I parsed the letters carefully. I read them aloud. I looked for similar phrases as if I were looking for clues to find a buried treasure — although in this case, my treasure was the privilege of paying them $20 and not having my email shut off.
Twenty emails later (this is not an exaggeration), I began to despair. I realized I had accomplished almost nothing in the last two days other than write emails to India. I had visions of an endless line of Indian technicians — stretching as far as the eye could see — ready to write pleasant replies to a witless woman in the U.S. As I exhausted the patience of one technician, another would step into his place, producing an infinite supply of unfailingly polite and utterly incomprehensible technical jargon.
I caved.
I hired someone on Fiverr from Bangladesh to serve as an intermediary. With my permission, he took over my computer, figured out how to get into my account, arranged a Zoom call with the company and — after a scheduled Zoom call and yet one more phone conversation — I was able to pay the $20.
“I don’t suppose I could pay for more than a year?” I asked at the end of the final phone call.
“No, but this will take you all the way to the end of 2026!” the exceedingly cheerful company spokesman told me.
I have many wonderful expectations for 2026, but I am already working up a little dread for the year’s end.
Till next time,
Carrie
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