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NOBODY UNDERSTANDS ME!

23 October 2007

I sometimes get so incredibly frustrated.  I understand why people with mental problems, who think they are communicating but who really cannot communicate at all, get frustrated when their words aren't understood.

I think about my mother, visiting her mother in the last months of her life.  My grandmother suffered from vascular dementia and aphasia.  When my mother came, she would recognize her (unlike my aunt with Alzheimers), be excited to see her and she would babble on incoherently about all the things that excited her.  My mother, of course, could not understand a thing she said, but she tried to pretend she could.  Eventually, my grandmother, depressed because her words were not being understood, just sunk back into her shell and indicated that she wanted to go back to her room.

My problem is that I think I am communicating very clearly.  I can see my words on the computer screen as I push the "send" button and they appear very clear to me, and then I get a message back that indicates that the person to whom I was writing either didn't read what I wrote, or did not understand it.

Maybe I'm like my grandmother.  Maybe I actually write in gibberish which seems as coherent and perfectly clear to ME as my grandmother's words were to her, but the words are not really clear and coherent to anybody else.

I don't necessarily want to single out Mike Hudack of Blip-TV, where I post my videos, because he is one of the most amazing guys about customer service that I have ever met.  He's usually quite prompt, and very helpful, in addition to being a genuinely nice person (I met him in SF last year).  But he is just the latest in a long line of people with whom I have had very frustrating e-mail interactions that make me question my ability to write a clear and coherent sentence. 

Here is my last message to him.

Blip has stopped posting to my Blogger page and I've had to do it manually. The reason is that I changed my password on G-mail. I could not find a place where you can simply change your Blogger password, so I finally deleted that account on my list of places for forwarding and then I added it again, but in response to my entering my password for this "new" blog, it tells me that "In response to the request, Blogger sent a message which Blip could not understand."

Now what do you see in this message?  What I see is that I am telling him that Blip does not post videos to my Blogger account because I changed my Blogger password recently and since there does not appear to be a place to reflect that change by simply editing the current settings, I deleted Blogger account entirely from my list of places to cross-post my videos and added it back in again with the new password, but Blip is not communicating with Blogger and I don't know why.

What message did I get back from Mike?

If you change your Google password you have to delete your old destination and add a new one. There's no way around it, unfortunately, because of the way the distributed authentication works.

WTF?  Didn't I just say that I had?

In fairness, once I pointed that out to him, he contacted me practically by return e-mail and began to work on solving the problem.

But it's so frustrating.  I try to be very clear about the specifics of an issue or a problem and people respond as if I hadn't spoken at all, or by telling me that I must do what I just wrote and told them that I already did.  Like I'm an idiot.

It happens so often, not only in dealing with businesses, but frequently in dealing with friends as well, that it makes me wonder if I really write as clearly as I think I do, and as I try to work to do.

(After MUCH discussion over two days, it appears that this is a known problem which Blip has contacted Google about before.  It also appears that I am the only person affected by the problem right now.

I feel so special.)
 

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