Jane Doe and the Case of the Empty Inbox
I’m feeling very bloggy this evening.
I had mentioned in an earlier post about how much I struggle every day with hopeful online entrepreneurs. It’s like forty (or more) hours a week of failure… that’s a lot to handle. But the worst one yet has been bugging me for a week or so now and I thought I’d share, in order to give you a better idea.
A woman called in because she hadn’t been receiving email due to, she hoped, a migration to a new system our legacy mail accounts are currently undergoing. With upgrades on this scale, accounts invariably slip through the cracks and, being on the front lines, I’m doing the fixing. About a month ago we sent out notices that these accounts would be upgraded, so when this particular hopeful quit receiving email it was clearly Yahoo!’s fault and I took the call.
She was very upset. Understandable. Most businesses are severely crippled without email and hers was no exception; it was the primary way people contacted her through her site and we broke it with our “upgrade!!!!” While I troubleshot, she elaborated.
“I mean, at first I thought it was just summer. Business should be slow in summer, right? But now I’m looking around at part-time jobs and…I mean, this is my livelihood! This is my primary income! I don’t even know how long my mail hasn’t worked is the bad part! I’m barely making ends meet because of this upgrade! You can’t be breaking people’s livelihoods!”
She wasn’t being mean about it, and I felt bad for her, but after I had verified all her settings on our end (several accounts aren’t being migrated correctly and I’m very familiar with how to fix them by this point) and all the settings on her end, I couldn’t find anything wrong. One thing that has changed is the way in which the accounts are accessed on the web, and several customers just don’t know how to get to their business mail inboxes anymore. I switched over to her business account and there sat my two or three test messages. When I told her that her account was working, she just had to click an extra link to view her business mail… and the realization hit her that she just hadn’t received any email…ALL SUMMER, I’m pretty sure I heard her heart break. I skipped and stuttered, struggling to come up with a tactful, professional yet sympathetic way to say “You weren’t getting email because it wasn’t sent to you,” but I don’t think it ever came to me. She wasn’t stupid, she knew. Christ, I wanted it to be our fault, but she simply didn’t have anybody that wanted her service. She was almost already to that point already; I’m positive she cried when she got off the phone with me.
If I had the power — if I owned a national advertising agency or a hugely popular destination on the web — I would do everything I could to promote this woman’s business. I wouldn’t even care if she’s really bad at what she does, I just felt so fucking awful for this woman — I feel like I single-handedly crushed all her dreams. I think about her and her failed business every day and it really bums me out.
Sometimes I wonder if this job affects any of my coworkers the way it does me.
2 Responses to “Jane Doe and the Case of the Empty Inbox”
Man, that kinda sucks. I’m not feeling for the woman myself, but I’m guessing that it was one of those, “You had to be there,” kind of things or something.
Do you get more than a few that you sympathize with, or is it mainly dimwits?
Her business is probably clubbing baby seals.
Leave a Reply