Bad News Serenade Arranged For Player Piano

After ten years, I am going to have to change my e-mail address.

The problem with it is that I can’t change my password, and someone has hacked my account.  Now, the reason that I can’t change my password is that it is a Yahoo mail address that I started before ATT and Yahoo merged, and I have been an ATT customer since before ATT and Yahoo merged, and when they did merge the Yahoo account became my ATT account, and when I try to change my password Yahoo sends me to ATT and ATT sends me back to Yahoo.

I know, it sounds goofy.  Every time I talk to anyone in tech support (and I have done so on-line, on the phone, in person at an ATT store) the person in tech support says, “Oh, yeah, sure, we can fix that…” and then tries to fix it, and tries, and tries, and eventually says, “No, we can’t fix that.”

I find it very hard to believe that I am the only person to whom this has happened, but I can’t find any information on either company’s websites or in any forums on this issue.  It seems like it should be something that can be dealt with handily, and everyone with whom I discuss the problem is very confident that there is some easy way to change the password, I just haven’t tried the right screen yet.

But then we try this screen and that screen and logging in here, clicking on the settings tab there, and we just end up getting shuttled back and forth between ATT and Yahoo until my poor tech support contact is a pale shadow of his or her former self, staring bleakly into the howling void in which any hopes of a rational universe have been extinguished.

Enough, say I.  I refuse to have any more walking wounded tech support personnel on my conscious.  Today I went over to GMail and I set up a Gmail account.  (If you know my old Yahoo address then you know my new GMail address, just substitute @gmail.com for @yahoo.com.)

Now, I haven’t closed my old Yahoo account (I’m not sure that such a thing can be done, actually, and I would probably end up in the same hall of mirrors if I tried) and I will continue using it while I get a handle on GMail.  But I can’t send out any new e-mail from my old Yahoo account, because it’s been put on hold because some dufus in the UAE is using it to spam with.  So for the time being I am using my work email to send out new e-mails.

Confused?  I know I am.

In any event, I will be going to every website at which I am registered and changing my e-mail, and sending out notices to everyone I know, giving them my new e-mail, and I am not looking forward to that.

Sometimes living in the future isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.  Sigh.