Phew! Finally got my tech issues sorted out. I have not been able to access my blog (the one you are reading right now, bless your heart) since last Monday due to a series of snafus combined with my signature mix of laziness and absentmindedness.

So first, I thought the problem was with my credit card. So I logged on to my credit card’s website. ZERO BALANCE? There should be $77 on that thing! OMG, I have been the victim of cybercrime! Who do I call? What do I do? No wonder my payment to Fatcow, my webhost, didn’t go through! I know, I’ll start a live chat with tech support! They probably have people for this kind of thing.

And it’s only once I had started the live chat that I realized I am on the website of my old VISA card, the one I got from Money Mart. D’oh!

So I log on to the RIGHT web site. There’s the money. So that’s not the issue. Then I notice on the card’s website that the status of my card is SUSPENDED.

Waddy fug? So then I have to call the tech support for my card and find out what THAT is all about. Turn out, it’s about their system suddenly flipping out because of an error it made when processing some admittedly slightly complicated stuff regarding my student loan.

For some no doubt completely legitimate and excruciatingly boring reason, they had to put the last part of my student loan into my bank account and then I had to pay that money to the school myself, and there was something about $1000 that would be temporarily one place but not really, and blah blah blah whatever.

The fact that I can understand that stuff without much problem if I try does not in any way make me more likely to try. I got other uses for my brain.

So that’s what the problem with my card was. The nice Quebecois fellow on the phone had to call me back like three hours later in order to have enough time to track down the problem and fix it.

And he had such a lovely accent, too. Definitely the educated Quebec accent, not the tabernaquino rural Quebec accent, which hurts my ears to listen to.

I suppose a lot of anglo-Canadians would have found his accent hard to understand, but due to my half-Acadian upbringing, I have like a +10 at least to my saving throw versus French Canadian accents.

To me, he sounded like one of the Acadian guys from the wrong side of the tracks from back home testifying in court. You know, carefully enunciating every word and using vocab that’s probably not the kind of words they use when talking with their buddies.

I, of course, found that very charming and cute.

Anyhow, after my new French crush called back, my credit card was cleared for action. I go to my blog – still a no go. Well, clearly the problem is that they tried to process my payment when my card was suspended. So I just have to contact their live chat and get them to process the payment again!

I do this, and they say I am all paid up. Wut? The Indian dude who I was live-chatting with told me the problem was that the “Something went wrong… ” screen was probably just stuck in Chrome’s cache and that clearing my cache would fix the problem. I thought that made sense, so I said goodbye and closed the chat window.

Then I looked up how to clear my cache. It was not exactly tricky. However, it took like ten minutes. I wiped everything but passwords.

No way am I deleting the passwords my browser knows, because for the most part, it’s the only thing that DOES know them. I sure as hell don’t.

After my browser finished its long dump, I tried to log on to my blog. Nope! Still not working. Argoaihsdiodhwoei’dhwed. So I do ANOTHER live chat to my web host.

This time, I tell the guy to look for problems with my account. He puts me on hold (so to speak) for around half an hour, then comes back and tells me that my account with FATCOW had been suspended due to a security issue that had let some bot somewhere post an ad on my blog.

Would have been nice if they had TOLD ME THAT. Oh well. Quite possibly they did and my whanging banging clanking monster beast of a mind lost it.

In other words, I forgot.

So he is nice enough, after a little scolding and telling me to put a CAPTCHA on my blog and update my plugins, he removed the suspension and voila, I could blog again.

And now I’m back! Did you miss me? I sure missed you! 🙂

I always miss blogging when I don’t get to do it, no matter how legitimate my reason for missing it is. It’s like a bodily need. It builds up no matter how good an excuse you have not to relieve it. Sooner or later, it demands release.

The whole deal was complicated by the sort of melted brain confusion and lethargy that I experience on summer afternoons. I can prevent it – or at least manage it – via aggressive hydration, but if I don’t get on that fast enough, I become too stupid and lazy to think of it.

Just one of life’s little complications, I suppose.

Plus I over-focus in the computer and ignore my body. In a very crude sense, it’s like a transcendent state of mind. The sort of thing that monks and other ascetics train their entire lives hoping to achieve – a state where the mind transcends the body and is thus freed of material concerns – and all I need is a decent video game.

Or a web browser and a blog.

Anyhow, that is the long and twisted tale of why I haven’t posted since last Monday. Everything is back to normal now, and there should be no further interruptions.

Thanks for reading me.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.