Today, I had a technology meltdown.

My email didn’t work. Thank goodness I can rely of Valley IT Support (www.valleyitsupport.com). I sent an email via my website at 6:17 am and had a reply by 6:23am setting a time to resolve this problem.

Then my phone dropped off a client in the middle of a conference call. I called the telephone company and the voice mail said that they were really busy and I should go online. I did and was lead through a series of menus until I got instructions on how to go out to my box, unscrew the lid and test my wires. I gallantly followed the instructions and unearthed my inner engineer hiding behind the marketing gal. But, since the problem of dropped calls was intermittent, my tests didn’t reveal anything. So I had to call the phone company and wait until I could request a technician.

I couldn’t upload changes to a client’s web site in the usual manner due to some technical difficulty. At I-Tul (www.I-Tul.com) the tech experts answer the phone and quickly offer alternatives to work around the issue. So, this was resolved quickly too.

The final straw was my calculator. I found “new” batteries that weren’t new enough to make it work and ended up doing calculations longhand. It’s good to know I can still do it.

This evening my step-mother said she finally got her email fixed. I had sent messages to the customer support requesting assistance for her. They had replied to her via email even though her problem was that she couldn’t access her email. That’s why I had submitted the service request for her. Is someone actually reading the service requests or is everything automated?

Today’s lessons:

• Having a responsive IT expert is priceless.
• Web sites are great to help customers help themselves and email is a wonderful tool but if those don’t work, customers need to be able to reach a real person.

Hopefully I’ll have time to actually do some marketing tomorrow since I went on a technology rant today.