The past week or so has been hell. I applied to change service provider , but wasn’t told that there would be up to 21 days when I would be without an internet connection. What!? How can anyone, trying to build an online business, survive for that long?

After 2 days of complaints and pleading, I was offered a temporary dial-up connection to keep me going in the mean time. Great! That’s a start. At least I’d be able to update my blog and keep abreast of my emails. The lady at the help desk started issuing instructions to guide me in setting up the dial-up modem.

Some hours later, after trying everything, including telling me to delete my previous System Preferences, she said that she’d exhausted all her knowledge and suggested I call a Mac technician. Then I was left with a "busy" tone on the phone. The operator was gone. I was left stranded with no connection, and no email account.

To add insult to injury, my last TWO years of emails (28,000 plus) have gone, floating somewhere in cyberspace, or perhaps they no longer exist at all, anywhere. That’s bad.

Now, being the type of person that never gives up, I called two Mac businesses for support. Nope, no luck. They couldn’t help. So, having been a support consultant from way back (before the internet days!), I decided to have a go at this myself. After an hour or so, my eyes lit up and my heart skipped a beat. I had somehow got the dial-up tone and it was dialling my new provider. Yes! …. Oh no, "authentication failed" and the line disconnected.

I persisted with fiddling and tweaking for some time until, at last, I was up and running. So, now I had the task of trying to find all my contacts for the formidable task of advising them of my new email address. As luck would have it, I had a PC hooked up to a router from my Mac, and when I used the PC I would check emails from there.

I gingerly opened up Outlook Express and… voila!… I was able to read old emails. There are only 2 months of emails in there and not for every day, but it’s a great start. I guess that my most important contacts would have sent emails during that time. So now I have a bit of a task ahead, changing my email address in all my memberships and subscription.

I reckon I handled the whole situation rather well really. I took a few deep breaths and persisted. I can do the essential stuff, and now I have some enforced free time.

There were many lessons in this scenario.

• If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
• Trying to save money may end up costing more than it’s worth.
• Always do a backup before updating or deleting info/data.
• Have a "Plan B" in place.
• Always ask questions before making a decision.
• Take plenty of breaks.
• Seek the positives if anything goes wrong.

I’m looking upon this as a liberating experience. After all I’ve cleaned out my old emails and I’m looking at what I really need or want. I’ll only re-subscribe to lists and memberships I can benefit from. I now have some free time to rethink, replan and restrategize my business, plus study and learn about stuff I need to polish up on.

Let’s continue to FAIL FORWARD.

It’s all good!

Sponsors