I think there is little chance of the emailed gift certificate ever actually arriving for my mom’s birthday last month. The problem, of course, is all due to my entire family being computer-stupid. Not just computer-illiterate, but stupid. It’s like they don’t even consider learning anything I tell them. Why does my sister insist on using Hotmail when she has a perfectly good email address that belongs to the ISP she pays for? Why is the concept of email redirection (aliasing) so completely alien that neither my mom nor sister can wrap their minds around it?
Hotmail, for those who don’t know, is evil. They have this wonderful feature, enabled by default, called “Junk Mail Folder” which is intended to hijack spam and keep it out of your inbox. Considering that Microsoft seems to sell your Hotmail address to everyone on the planet, this seems like a peculiar thing to do. Kind of like taxing farm subsidies. Anyway, if your Hotmail address isn’t in the “To” or “CC” lines of an email, Hotmail assumes it is junk mail and throws it into the Junk Mail folder. Since I’ve grown tired of figuring out what my siblings’ email addresses are as they change more often than my home address, I’ve set up aliases for them. When I email mom@andysocial.com, for instance, it gets redirected to (get this) my sister’s email box. Why? Because my mom doesn’t have her own email, even though sis uses Hotmail and all of her kids have at least one email address each. Someone in that house can set Grandma up an email account, but nobody ever does.
Now, since the gift certificate from Amazon was sent to “mom” and not my sister’s Hotmail address, it got thrown in the Junk Mail. This is all my theory. Trying to get any kind of coherent conversation about computers from my family is like talking to a chipmunk. It may be amusing, but not very informative. So, I email my sister directly, with a CC to “mom” and tell her what to do if she does not see two copies of this email in her inbox. Does she do it? No. I have no confidence that my mom will ever get this gift certificate. I really should stick with paper when dealing with these twits.
current_music: Whodini – Freaks Come Out At Night
current_mood: annoyed
Previous 
Next 
Categories
Tag Cloud
Blog RSS
Comments RSS
Last 50 Posts
Back
Void 
Life 
Earth 
Wind 
Water 
Fire