Update: I seem to be back on Twitter. THANKS!

I was suspended and then for a while, I could post again but wasn’t following/being followed by anyone. It felt oddly lonely out there… Mouse and Pengie and Dogmomster re-followed me (thanks you guys) but then I was suspended again.

This got resolved a lot faster than the last time I was accused of “strange activity” by a web service provider. That time, I was accused very specifically of spamming. Was I spamming? NO!!!! It was back in around 2001. When the Internet was the wild, wild west. We had just wrapped up another session of YAG summer theatre camp and I was recuperating up on the Shores of Gitchee Gumee. I wanted to update the YAG website, which was in a subdirectory of ababsurdo at that time. I went online with my strawberry iMac over our dial-up connection. Hello? My whole site was gone! Huh?? I waited a bit and tried again. Nothing. Again. Nothing. Well, shoot, I decided I would have to call the server folks. I hate calling customer service from the get go. In this case, there was the added difficulty that I wouldn’t be able to be online AND on the phone at the same time. Because I was using the only phone line for the dial-up connection. I could use my cell phone but back in those days that meant huge roaming charges.

I sucked it up and called. The neanderthal (yes) who answered the phone said, “We suspended your site because you’re spamming!” Just like that. Say what? I told them I was *not* spamming. “Well, who “does” your website?” they asked. Uh, that would be me! Yes, a little old moom with a website. I wondered if they had *looked* at my primitive home page. They made some vague noises about fixing it and I got off the phone. I slugged around down on the beach or whatever and tried again later. Nothing. Called again. More vagueness. Waited some more. Nothing. They obviously didn’t give a rat’s ass whether my site was up or not. I was paying something like $20 per month for this service, folks.

It is *painful* to have to call any kind of customer service from a summer cabin on Lake Superior, especially when they keep blowing you off. On about the third day, I decided I meant business. I called again. This time I told the neanderthal that I was not going to get off the phone until my site was back on line. I am not characteristically calm in situations like that but I had steeled myself. After a bit more wrangling, I asked the neanderthal if he could *see* my site. I figured if he actually *looked* at it, he would know that I wasn’t a sophisticated enough web developer to be able to set up some blasted spamming scheme. Yes, he could. “Oh, yeah, weather all over Michigan.” He laughed (!!!) I said something like, “*Now* do you realize that I am not a spammer?” He did. Sometime that day — after a THREE DAY ordeal — my site was active again.

Hopefully Twitter realizes that they got the wrong gal (or maybe, as the GG suggests, I was hacked). I follow 42 people on Twitter. That’s about all I can handle keeping up with. Almost all of them are people I KNOW in real life! Friends, family members, my DAUGHTERS, fer kee-reist! I tweet more often on some days than others. Spurts. Random stuff. About whatever odd thing is going on at the moment. Or progress on a journey of some sort. So people I care about know where I am and what I’m doing. Crossing the Mackinac Bridge. Again… I have 398 followers. I think a lot of those folks follow me because of my user name “kayakwoman”. Even though I don’t often tweet about kayaking. Maybe those folks would be glad to get rid of me. Who knows. They can unfollow if they want. But I am NOT a spammer and I am NOT engaging in any kind of “strange activity”. Except for the sometimes strange stuff that spices up my rather boring existence.

Click here or on the pic for a larger view of ababsurdo’s roots.

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 1st, 2009 at 4:10 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.