Why is this blog here and what happened

Don’t make Google mad……however you will never know if you do

Of course I had already drunk the cool-aid when I figured that out!

My jhmoss@gmail.com account was disabled by google. Because it was a free account you cannot find out why and there is no one to contact to find out if you can get it back.

Losing an email account is a pain, but most people have more than one, as I did, and it is not a total disaster, unless you lose the google account that is tied to everything else google.

Like:

My email

My blog: with over 300 posts

My phone number: 720 Edit Law was a google voice phone number. When I lost that email, I lost that phone number

Unknown number of phone calls from clients and other people calling that number the past six days

My voicemail: all voice mail messages I have received and not checked yet or kept for various reasons is gone because I used google voice.

My apps on my android phone: very few of my apps now work on my android phone

My android phone is not working well at all. Every couple of hours I have to turn it off and back on again. It is just opening apps up continuously after a while and you can’t stop it.

If I get a new phone or have to reset this phone I will lose all of the apps I paid for. When you reload your email account the apps download that you’ve paid for. This won’t work now.

My RSS feeds because I was using google reader

My podcasts because I was using google reader

All documents I have at Google Docs

2000 contacts who I’ve given business cards to with a now dead phone number

500 contacts who I’ve given business cards to with a now dead email address

Actual costs

2000 business cards with wrong phone numbers or email addresses

250 refrigerator magnets with a QR code taking you to the wrong phone number or email address.

Dozens of hours of frustration, agony and anguish.

How did it happen?

I can honestly say I don’t know. I was exploring google’s new music service. Whenever I found a “free” song I liked I clicked on it.  After a while I realized nothing was happening. Nothing was downloading, nothing was going on.  I clicked on country music songs even, and believe me I’m not a country music fan, except maybe Willie Nelson on some days and still nothing. The songs had listen buttons so I clicked on them and was listening to some of the music and moved on to some other sites to research.

About that time I was getting error messages from Outlook asking me for my password. This occurs occasionally with Outlook so I ignored it.

Eventually I tried to do something that required me to log into my gmail account. When I did I was taken to a page that said my account had been disabled. From that page you are directed to the terms of service and a “contact” page. The contact page allows you to ask for “help” by telling google what happened. This I suspect from my research is a joke because no one knows what happened based on the google forums I have been living in.

That is the end of the story, there is no help, and there is no redress, there is nothing.

So?

1.         I’m trying to rebuild my blog. After about 4 days I realized I was out of luck and needed to start again. I’ve opened a WordPress account and started posting new and old blog posts there. www.recreation-law.com.

For the time being, things are going to be lacking links to older articles. Sorry, I’m moving as fast as I can. Long term I hope it is slightly better than before. It’s an opportunity to clean up and re-do.

2.         Next is to start with email addresses and to stabilize them. I need new, non-google addresses to contact everyone and let them know I have new email addresses and phone numbers. I can’t use google email to do that because they kick you off the service for too many bounced emails. Since I don’t know who was emailing me, I figure I have to contact everyone.  I have 12,069 contacts in Outlook; I really hope I have a lot of duplicates.

3.         Buy new business cards and refrigerator magnets……

What can you do?

The terms of service that you agree to with google are absolutely draconian and you have little chance of prevailing. I have figured out one area they might have missed I believe.

Because my telephone is affected by all of this, google, a non-telephone provider has cancelled my phone service in violation of Federal Communications Commission regulations. I’m hoping that I can have the FCC hop on this bandwagon. Any time you file a complaint with a state or federal agency you need to do two things.

            File the complaint online as they request and follow up with a written complaint. The written complaint should include a copy of the online complaint so you don’t have two running, as well as including any documentation necessary.

            Copy your Senators and Congressperson.

I’ve also filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. The terms of service cover email quite broadly however they can’t say they can take away your phone service.

Wish me luck.

PS

Thank heavens I did not buy into google wallet, they would have taken my money.

PSS

I also switched to Bing for my searches.  J

What do you think? Leave a comment.

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