The person you are trying to reach can not be located

The home officially went on the market on Tuesday. Today the yard sign is in place, and discussions with neighbors have been ratcheted up a notch.

I was calling around changing addresses yesterday. Since I am mostly out of the house while it is on the market, I also am trying to reduce unnecessary expenses where I can. I called Verizon to see if I could reduce the tv and internet service we’re signed up for at the house. I thought the contract ran through January, so I was hoping to get a cheaper package to cut costs in the meantime. Apparently the contract was up last week, so I was able to cancel both TV and internet service. Yay!

I wasn’t thinking things through though, because that also canceled my Verizon e-mail account For some reason it also wiped the DVR clean. Now I can’t log onto the account and any e-mail sent to me from now on goes nowhere. I wasn’t sure if people would get an error, or if it just goes into the ether. (A friend latter let me know that he received a bounce-back message).

I like so many others have become very e-mail dependent. When I was working as a real estate agent, I realized how many people turn to e-mail as there first means of communication. I was meeting a potential buyer at a house, and waited 45 minutes before giving up on him. When I made it home and checked my e-mail, I found a message from him that he wasn't going to make it - sent 5 minutes before our meeting time. Of course I was already at the meeting place by then. He had my phone number, but didn't think to use it. I bought a new phone that received e-mail a short time later.

My Verizon e-mail was my main and professional e-mail address. It is on my former business cards, my resumes, networking sites, etc. Now it was no longer valid. As an odd coincidence, two days ago my Windows-based phone required an upgrade on a program that allowed me to access my MSN e-mail address. The upgrade wiped out the old program, but did not install one to replace it. I haven't done research yet, but for now the end result is my Windows-based phone can't receive e-mail from my MSN account (and now I'm hooked on mobile access).

So my MSN e-mail wasn't accessible by my phone, and the address wasn't the most professional anyway. Not something I should be putting on resumes. So I added a Gmail account to the growing list of e-mail accounts. Of course I am late to the Google game, so my name is long gone as an e-mail address. A series of numbers had to be added.

Then came the task of letting all the people and websites know how to get a hold of me now. People were updated relatively easily - at least those in my address book - but websites were another issue. Since I've acquired several e-mail accounts over the years, different websites have different e-mail addresses attached to them. I've run into more than one site that won't let me change the address without signing up for a new account.

It would be nice to have e-mail portability something like cell phone numbers have now. That, and a forwarding message like you could put on an old phone number when you moved. Of course changing my address did drop several mailing lists that I won't go out of my way to renew. Maybe I don't want leave a trail after all.