Communication Breakdown

Over the years I've accumulated several email accounts. I suspect quite a few of you have as well. Some of them die when we switch jobs or internet providers; others hang around for a long time.

At the moment I have six that I use with any regularity: my primary personal account; a work account; one for blog-related correspondence (you guys can email me, you know); one from my internet provider; a secondary account on that domain that I created after the first became too spam-ridden (I use these two for miscellaneous online stuff); and an account that is associated with my eBay and PayPal profile.

I have the last one because it seemed like a good idea to keep those sorts of financial doings separate from the rest of my online life. This account is with Lycos (yes, they still exist, and I don't blame you for being surprised). Initially I set up my PayPal account with a mac.com address, but about a year after I'd established it, Apple took those away from people who didn't want to pay $100 a year to keep them, and I had to find something else.

The only reason I'm mentioning any of this is because I could not access my Lycos Mail account for about 36 hours. The browser would just sit there, trying to do its thing, with the little circle going around up in the corner. Finally today, around lunch time, I was able to get back in. I don't know if it was just me, but I couldn't find anything online about a service outage.

Fortunately I didn't have any items for sale on eBay this week, and I wasn't bidding on anything, so I didn't miss anything other than a couple of messages from Lord & Taylor and Omaha Steaks (apparently I overlooked a check box when I bought my dad that package from them for Christmas, because they had the nerve to CALL MY FUCKING HOUSE to tell me about a "special offer"). But I'm very glad I don't use the Lycos account for anything crucial.

I'm considering getting rid of it entirely, but it's a lot of trouble to change everything with PayPal and eBay. Say what you want about Google, but my Gmail account has never been inaccessible for more than a few minutes.