I worked at Legal Services, helping the poor, in a very lefty office where tech was important. Our managing attorney was something of a geek and he loved Google, the search engine. I had never heard of it before.

I began to explore it and I too came to love it. Who wouldn't love such a useful thing, run by a company with the motto  "Don't be evil"?

Eventually the managing attorney said he'd lost his enthusiasm for Google, though he never told me why. He advocated for another browser, but I was still head over heels for Google's browser. And of course by that time, Google even had an office in our fair city that I walked by every day on my way to work. I had a have dozen gmail accounts, and even the university where I'd gone to school had converted to gmail.

Everything is different now. I moved first to London and then to Europe. The right-wingers started destroying actual Constitutional freedoms in the name of their own hatred of rules, their own desire to lie about people, to make things up and have them accepted as truth, their desire to oppress everyone who doesn't believe the utter crap that they base their lives on. The Plague came and everyone knows that the Plague and freedom don't mix very well. People died. R.I.P. everyone. Peace and power.

And Google went from actually living up to the trust I had put in them -- to keep my personal email safe from others but to grant me access to it -- to refusing to provide any help for people who can't get into the email accounts using their account recovery system. Once upon a time, it appears from all I've now read in my quest to get a decade+ old account back, you could escalate your case for "manual review." If you'd lost your phone number or recovery email or your 2-factor authentication device, an actual living person with the power to assist you could look at your case and pass judgment. Now a combination of bots and human operators can "guide you through the recovery process" which I had already guided myself through probably a dozen times. Note: it doesn't work any better when a "specialist" with no actual power "guides" you through it than it does when you guide yourself through it. It's just more annoying because they ask you questions that reflect just how stupid they believe you are. And they ask them repeatedly, probably because they're bots.

I've read of people who lost their business email accounts when, for example, they split with their spouse who had their mobile phone account in their name. It turns out that the internet is written on sand. All it takes is a good strong wind and it will collapse. I wonder if Google has forgotten this, though. Along with their "don't be evil" slogan, which they've abandoned. 

I was reading a forum where people were trying to get help getting back into their email, sometimes for literal years. The person running the forum said to this poor man, finally, who appeared to have lost everything, from his wife to his house to his email account, "You're going to have to accept that you will not get it back."

I thought, "Yep. I'm going to have to accept it, too." I spent a silent evening periodically thinking about this. Things you have to accept. I have to accept, for example, that because a friend died of Covid, and her family gave a bunch of my stuff away to charity shops, I will never get back a corset I had made bespoke for $750. It's okay though, because I'm not wearing it, right? I don't need it. And it's literally gone to who knows where. It would be pointless to mourn it too hard. It had its uses. Bye, corset. You were fun to wear.

I have to accept that my mom and dad have a bunch of my stuff and I can't go back to the US and will probably lose it all when they can't stay in their house anymore. It's just souvenirs of my life. Souvenirs. Like the cedar box that my brother made for me when I was eighteen and he was fifteen. Full of trinkets from college and post-college travels. A sand rose from the Sahara desert. A miniature red London double decker bus. A note from my best friend who died when we were in a car accident. My brother's  hand-carved design covering the lid. There is literally nothing for me to do to get that box of treasures because I can't expect my parents to put it somewhere for me at this stage. It's not reasonable. I wouldn't ask that of them. It's not fair.

I have to accept, also, that my brother is dead. My only brother died at 34 of unshakeable depression. I have to accept it because there is literally no way to change it short of a time machine that is apparently not forthcoming, and not to accept it would be to go mad and perhaps follow him into an untimely jar of ashes.

It's seems trivial at first. Not nearly as important as all the other things I've had to accept. That Google is going to take my email, set up by me in 2009, in which I had life changing conversations, which led to me realising that I was worth something, did not have to stay in an at least bad and at worst abusive relationship, did not have to give up my dreams. Could move to London, could go back to grad school, could become a novelist, could make a living as an editor and writer. Could marry someone who loved me as much as I loved them. Could be happy. Google, in spite of the support teams' assurances that they know it's important, seemed to boil it down to trivial at the end of the recovery process with the words, "consider setting up a new gmail account." Because email is just a thing that you use in the moment to send messages and get messages and all you've written at all the 2ams where magic was real and miracles happened, and all the words that will never happen again, that you counted on for solace, can be replaced if only you set up a new email account and forget all about the things that once make you happy.

I have to accept that, right? Because even though Google made its business on email, which began with me and others like me, they say I have to accept that there's nothing they can do except offer me a new, blank screen.

​You know what, Google? I don't think I do. And I don't think I shall. 

On my birthday, April 5th, Tim gave me a new phone.  

I have been using Blackberry since I first got a smart phone in 2009. I fell in love with the full QWERTY keyboard because I like to type without looking and I found I could do that with my thumbs on a Blackberry. I've had three or maybe four different ones. 

I have, for reasons I won't go into, a need to make things big on my screen. It involves eyes and shockingly enough seeing. So when I tried a touchscreen a few times, I found it really difficult to use. But now Androids are big enough that I can effectively use a touchscreen keyboard. And the Blackberry had  become less and less useful. Twitter stopped supporting it. Other apps wouldn't work. I struggled to make WhatsApp work on it.

​So it started with HOORAY! A NEW PHONE!

On my birthday,  Tim helped me get my phone set up. My main use for my phone right now is to check the various email accounts that I care about without having to go to each one on my desktop computer (a laptop plugged into a monitor, keyboard and mouse). So he set up some of them. Then he got to my secondary account, which is connected to my Twitter. It's also one I've used to exchange private email threads since I lived in the US for fear that someone would try to read my email back then.

I knew the password and he put it in. It asked him to put in the phone number for verification. That's normally no big deal, but as I hadn't had to actually log in to that account for who knows how long, (because it was permanently logged in on my Blackberry) all the other security information I didn't know. I was able to look up the phone number. (I keep my phone numbers in my contacts under my own name) but here is where the problems started.

A while ago, this number stopped working. I didn't know why, but I half-thought it was because I needed to top it up. It's a pay as you go number that I got just before I moved to London in 2010. I contacted EE and gave them the deets. A very friendly and helpful team member assisted me. Unfortunately, he told me that the company had "cancelled down" the number for lack of use. It's true, I hadn't used it because Tim and I live in Europe now. Also, I couldn't figure out how to top it up from here.

​

I went through the account recovery steps for getting into my email again. Several times. Hey, it said I could. 

One of the other things that I didn't even remember I'd set up (and which I have since learned Gmail no longer supports) was a verification question. The question, which I must have set up in 2009, was not familiar, though I knew what it was about at least. I could imagine myself submitting this question. Unfortunately, past me was far too clever for her own good. I used to imagine that if someone were trying to break into my account, I would need a question no one on Earth could answer except me. Well, so many years later, I know what the question is getting at, but not how past me would have phrased the answer. Google said I could try more than once and I began going through the possible ways the answer could have been written. I quickly realised that there were far too many of them to have much chance of accidentally getting it right. So in spite of knowing the email and the password, I can't use either of my back up methods. 

Gmail has double locked me out, it seems. 

But what's weird for me is that I actually am logged in on my old phone. Which is right here on my desk, alongside the laptop I can't get in on, and the new phone I can't get in on. I do have my recovery email -- and the email I can't get into is also my recovery email for my main account, as well as my twitter-linked email, and I may have even set them up at or near the same date.

The photo above felt like Google mocking me. I get it twice, on my main account and the account they refuse to let me into on any new device (or even my main computer that I've been using for five years). We blocked someone who used your password. Yes, Google. You blocked me. I know my password.

So what I did next was to join Google One, which is a paid file storage service run by Google. I admit I did it to get access to Google support. I found it suggested on the web, by someone who used it to get their account back. He said it was the quickest way. Well, it isn't. At least not now. I imagine the poor beleaguered Google One team being inundated with requests to recover email accounts.  The person (or people using the name Jane -- I don't imagine you always get just one person -- was apologetically chatty. I could sense the fear that I would have some sort of tantrum. We are all so alike, people who've lost access to their email accounts, in the end. We freak out. 

I started out hopeful and ended up feeling lied to and betrayed by this team member who was just using the Google playbook to answer my questions. To say things like "Even Google employees have to use the account recovery sequence" and "I hope you and your family are doing well during these difficult times." I feel as if the responses -- which were clearly intended to stop me from trying to get in without the account recovery system that was never, ever going to work for me -- pushed me to ask more questions. Don't lie to people in a world where everyone lies. Say, "Look, I'm sorry but I can't help you. I work for Google One, not Gmail. There's no support for Gmail. You don't pay for that account and it's not our fault you lost your phone number." Or "Do you know how many people come here looking for help? We are not allowed to help you because we'll get done for GDPR violations."

Please don't say "Use a familiar device."  I *am* using a familiar device. I don't know why it's not familiar to you as it's ben my main computing device for at least four years. 

Don't say "We need to verify your identity". Say, "You can get in if we can text or call you on the phone number you put in there yourself eleven years ago. We don't care if you let it get deactivated. That is not our problem." I would rather you say that than, "We will get you sorted in a little while. Just do this recovery thing".  I had already shown them that I'm receiving "Critical Security Alerts" from that account on my Blackberry whenever they block one of my attempts to get in.
The truth is that I have all sorts of evidence that it's my account. Just not the particular evidence that they want.  

Does Google "Don't be evil" (revised to "Oh well, we no longer care about being evil, let's change our mission statement") have an ethical obligation not to effectively steal people's private conversation history and just keep it? Not read it, but not let its owner have it back, ever, like some wizard in a cave with a riddle no one can answer?

I'm pretty sure they'll say that's not what they're doing. They're protecting my privacy and security. To my knowledge, no one else has ever tried to get into my account. Just me. Is protecting it from me part of their remit?

Do you believe for one minute that they could not get me back in there if they wanted to? Because on this question their entire email service -- which I'll point out is now the primary email service for huge corporations and for universities like the University of Michigan where I used to work -- succeeds or fails. If anyone at any time can be permanently locked out of their email based on a fluke of a cancelled phone number, would anyone trust their company's thousands of emails to Gmail?