“la parole exportée”

photo credit: cking

What happened to me yesterday as I was slightly behind schedule finishing a project, and therefore ’slightly on edge,’ is a good excuse for a cautionary tale.

What I was doing well:

• concentrating on finishing on time
• answering the phone, and scheduling an appointment for today, rather than getting more delayed
• telling a relative that we couldn’t speak -and meet- until I had finished that project
• not checking on Facebook, Twitter etc. and various sources of distraction
• not checking and reading all the interesting links posted there
• not letting myself be distracted by the strange MSN pop-ups that suddenly came in rapid succession, about 8 or 10 of them

What I did very, very wrong:

• getting annoyed beyond all measure by all these pop-ups that had “Ebay” and “TV set” on them (I wasn’t auctioning any TV set)
• rushing to open my Hotmail account to see what was going on
• clicking on the last e-mail from Ebay that confirmed my change of password…

Change of WHAT?

At the very same time, Hotmail went dead, MSN went dead, Ebay was dead.

Thankfully, Hotmail is not the account I use to communicate with my clients. And I have several alternative e-mail accounts, in case one has a problem.

But I am left negotiating with Ebay and MSN, to claim my accounts back. They were swifter in responding than I expected, they seem to understand, but we’ll see. The irony is that of course, there is no TV set listed under my Ebay ID. I checked as a guest.

This has been said and written a million times: Be careful.

[End of story: both accounts are now recovered, without any damage. I'd like to thank both Microsoft France and Ebay France for acting swiftly and efficiently]

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 24th, 2008 at 7:24 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.