QUICK E-MAIL FIX

A week or so ago my wife Terry started receiving multiple copies of the same e-mails,  sometimes 3 or 4 and other times up to a dozen copies of the same e-mail.  She also lost the 6 most recent months of her inbox.  Knowing full well asking me to fix the problem was akin to asking pigs to fly; she did her best and hoped that it would just solve itself.  It didn’t, it only got worse.  I called Cox Communications, our service provider.  They walked me through all the steps to insure her settings were correct and a bunch of other stuff and determined that the problem was not theirs but was the Outlook Express software of Microsoft.

There it was, the dreaded Microsoft.  I was willing to exhaust all remedies before calling Microsoft, including throwing the computer in the garbage and buying a new one.  You see, I have had some mind altering experiences with them over the years.  I am talking about their fix-it department.  I’ll explain.

Whenever I call and explain my dilemma, customer service turns me over to someone they deem an expert on said dilemma.  Invariably, I get a person who took an on-line Rosetta Stone class in the English language a few days prior to my call.  This would not be a problem to most but when you are deaf it is most certainly a problem.

For that reason I am dreading making this call.  I get a good night’ sleep, have a nutritious breakfast, shower, dress and I am as ready as I will ever be.  I dial the 800 number, explain what’s wrong and then listen patiently as the lady tells me she will be transferring my call to a designated expert. 

At this time I interrupt her to deliver my remarks that I had been working on for days.  I calmly explained that I am a deaf person.  I am listening to her over a phone designed for deaf people.  That, nothing personal, I would prefer to speak with a male person because the deeper tones of a man’s voice are easier to decipher than the higher pitch of a woman’s voice.  And, again, nothing personal, I would prefer someone whose native tongue is my own because they’re much easier for me to understand than someone whose base language is other than English. 

The lady says “No problem, I understand perfectly”.  So I am transferred to a girl named Mardy Ann who is 7,295 miles away in the Philippines.  She turned out to be quite proficient in the English language and, with my urging, spoke up enough that I was able to get by.  Mardy Ann turned out to be a gem. 

I am not up to speed with many of the technological advances that the younger generation take for granted so it amazes me when someone half way around the world and below the equator logs on to my computer and I can see them moving the mouse around and making changes to MY computer. 

Mardy Ann told me to just sit back and relax while she fixed things.  I watched as she moved the mouse around and clicked on this and that in a blur.  Often something would have to be uploaded or downloaded and I would watch patiently as a little green bar measured the progress.  Often this process would take the better part of an hour.  The first time it happened I thought she had deserted me so I finally said “Are you there Mardy”?  The answer came back “I’m here Sir”.  She always called me Sir. 

The first day our session lasted 6 ½ hours.  My cell phone died and she had to call me back on the land line.  She finally said she had to go home and would call me back about mid-afternoon the next day. 

The next day’s session lasted 4 hours.  During one lull I learned that monsoon rains had wreaked havoc with Mardy’s small village.  There was severe flooding and roads and bridges were washed away. 

The third day was a 2 hour chat session to tie up loose ends.  Mardy determined that the problem was a corruption of all e-mail files caused by the sheer volume of files.  She gave me a stern lecture about backing files up from time to time to keep thing manageable.  We never did recover valuable inbox and sent items folders.  She did fix, out of the goodness of her heart, a myriad of other problems that had plagued Terry’s computer for some time. 

The next day I got an e-mail from Microsoft asking me to fill out a survey about the service I had received.  I gave Mardy the highest numbers possible in all categories and summarized by saying I thought she should be head of their customer service department.