I think of myself as distinctly not a hoarder. When in doubt, throw it out, is generally my motto. I don’t typically get attached to things, and nothing in my fridge is even nearly past its expiration date. Partly this is because I live in a tiny cottage with one eensy closet and virtually no storage. Accordingly, I don’t accumulate stuff. I am constantly looking for ways to streamline.
Except, it turns out, that I have a lot more stuff than I thought. It’s just invisible.
Recently I upgraded my Mac OS to Mavericks. Named after a famous surf break not far from where I live in California, Mavericks sounds like a laidback, easygoing sort, doesn’t it? Turns out that Mavericks (real name: Mac OS 10.9.1) is actually a deviant sociopath intent on ruining my life one byte of data at a time. From the moment I upgraded, my email ceased to function properly. The first sign of distress was that my 20+ years of saved data disappeared from my virgo-organized folders. Vanished. Into thin air. Luckily, I have all that data backed up (this is not my first rodeo) and was able to restore it. But then it disappeared again. Restore. Disappear. Restore. Disappear. And on.
Next, email started vanishing from my Inbox. And my Sent Mail folder. Then, email stopped sending from one account. Then another. Then, it stopped coming in entirely.
I made calls. We fixed settings. Just to be really sure, Macmail downloaded 17,658 emails into my inbox.
They disappeared. I made more calls. We fixed settings. The server again vomited 17,658 emails into my inbox. In case you’re wondering how long it takes to download 17,658 emails, it takes about 18 hours. This process repeated itself four times.
It went on. Lots of calls. Lots of crying. Lots of storming around.
Slowly, my life fell apart. I stopped calling friends back. I stopped exercising. I stopped leaving the house, except to go pick up takeout. I started eating a lot of pizza. I got fat. I felt helpless. I couldn’t fix it. Apple couldn’t fix it. Go Daddy — my email host — couldn’t fix it. I considered going back to waitressing. I thought fondly of pills.
Then, because no one else is going to solve my problems except me, as usual, I picked myself up off the floor and made a decision: Google Apps for Business. Thank you to several of my friends who helped guide me in this direction, and several others who kept their lips sealed when I disregarded their advice not to do this.
I’m going to go lay some flowers on Steve Jobs grave. When I get back, I will try to answer your email. If I can find it.
[...] freelance business. With this latest technical maelstrom, it has become very obvious to me that my data hoarding has reached its apex, and it’s time to simplify. However, my attempts to do so have not been [...]