Welcome Back, Brenda

Welcome back, Brenda, to the Internet. You have mail. This is a self-therapy letter, touted by shrinks as being healthy and healing.

It has been eleven days since a gross mix-up began with the telephone company and its allied Internet server. Ten days of mind-warping confusion over a simple request to change the name on the account. The confusion was entirely of their making ... not only mass interdepartmental mis-communication, but a string of downright errors and time-consuming, misguided advice. Official telephone representatives and a series of distant technicians at the other end of the phone line eventually succeeded in transferring a sort of Stockholm syndrome into my acknowledged low-tech, miserably co-dependent head. It was not my phone/Internet system in derangement as one polite message put it, it became me. As cunningly effective as skilled surgeons, they managed to amputate my sense of humour, destroy my central nervous system and eviscerate my guts. All systems flatlined there for a while. A truly empathetic IT Guy took pity on my dissolving persona and finally sorted much of it out with only a few cuss words uttered (unlike moi).

I spare you the dreary details. Everyone has had similar crashes and aggravating conflict with various personnel, I know. Overreaction some might say? Certainly reflects the fragility of my crisis management and less than healthy dependency on all invisible cyber things. Damage done, probably five years off what’s left of the rest of my life. What used to be the excitement of the learning curve has lost some of its joy. Nevertheless, up and at ‘em again.

Thank you for listening.