Shocks and Surprises (Part 3)

As I begin to write this post, I find mercury finally losing its battle against Mother Nature. The temperature has already dropped to sub-zero and the dreaded winter is finally upon us! And finally the moment has also arrived for the final installment about the genesis of my new blog. For the past two weeks almost everyone who reads the blog has commented about how “not funny” is the scenario of not finishing the post and I yeah, I love the feeling of generating that feeling. :) To further infuriate them, the finale is going to be self-admittedly rather unflattering!! But that’s why we say “Ignorance is bliss” ,so let’s continue!

As I reached back my office, the first thing that I did was to start reinstalling software on my new operating system. Almost done, I was ready to show it off to everyone I could catch hold of. The first person who I went to was my batch mate and my very dear friend who unlike my other friends, is as interested in talks related to computers as me. After showing him all the new cool features that Windows 7 has, I also pointed out some deficiencies that it had and then let him know how I had worked around them. He suggested me to post my experiences on my blog so that others having similar problems could benefit from it. I found the idea really good and within an hour I was ready with one of the first user reviews of Windows 7!!

Same evening, I was having a talk with another of my friend, who incidentally had installed Windows 7 and had a similar problem as mine.

“You should have read my blog bro!” I said to him with a self-satisfied smile.

“But you haven’t posted anything new!” was his reply.

Now I usually post all my blogs using the “Windows Live Writer”, really handy blogging software by which you can post things without using the actual blogger posting tool. But using it means that technically, I never ever visit my own blog!! Having gained a real confidence in it, I had even stopped double-checking to see whether my post had been actually published online or not. But getting the unusual reply, I immediately opened the software to find that the post had actually been unpublished due to authentication error.

The first thought that crossed my mind was that the new OS had erased my password and I just had to re-type it. I tried that but it didn’t work, tried that again and the same error message and although I was pretty certain what my password was. I tried using the “Forgot your password?” option but it kept throwing the security question as “Who was your first teacher ever?”

There were two problems with that. One, I never set that question and two; I couldn’t!! because frankly, I have no clue who it was! Just then the thought struck me that my blog wasn’t under my Google but the Yahoo account as well so the link for the password change should go there too. Checking it, I found that it indeed had. I clicked on the link and I got a captcha code verification link to verify that I am going to change the password, once I did that, I got the next page as, “Who was your first teacher ever?” (arrrgghh..)

By now, I was close to tearing my hairs in splits. I tried to contact Google and went as far as doing all the things that they had listed as the “last resorts” but all of those paths lead me down to the one single sentence that proved to be the fatal blow for my blog -“WHO WAS YOUR FIRST TEACHER EVER?”!! I love Google, but that one day of their non-response was absolutely deserving of a howler!

So that’s how that eventful day of shocks and surprises finally got over. That my friends, was the story of how I started my new blog. My apologies to all the readers if I tested their patience and hopefully my future posts will not take the route of fragmented narratives. Amm..well, they just might!! ;)