Very akin to the feeling of despair – when you are marooned on a lonely island, when charge runs out of your mobile (assume for a verrrry long time), when you are lost in a foreign land and don’t know the language, when you lose touch with old and dear friends, when you cannot find a “sentimentally valuable” object,….very akin to these…is how I felt when I lost my very long used, but now outdated email account. How & why did it happen to me, I have no clue, though I did rise above my usual technological inertia and put fight to retrieve the account for all the reasons mentioned above.
I can barely describe the grief caused by the loss of my old email account – as I kept discovering one inconvenience after another, discomforts mounting by the day…
1) Loss of all contacts – carefully accumulated (but stupidly stored without backup) over the years. The worst thing with me (& people like me) is – I don’t remember enough names to figure out WHOSE contact information I ve lost and need to rebuild. “Top of the mind” hardly helps. My world seems to have shrunk by 90% already….lost people compounded by a terrible memory 
(2) Loss of orkut account (3) Loss of Linked-in account
- impact same as above. Additional impact – no hopes of being “socially networked” ever again, unless I put fight (lazeynetworker too)
- nice things that people wrote about me in a fit of generosity when they had enough time on their hands – all blown away, since rarely can a human being repeat the same mistake of writing a testimonial for me !
(4) Loss of Picasa account – simply extra hard work.
And now come the indirect effects:-
(5) Updation (or non updation as the case maybe) of email id in databases that govern my lifestyle - credit card companies, banks, loyalty programmes, railways, airlines, alumni network etc etc.
Well, one good thing is, loss of an identity mandates creation of a new one. Starting new is always exciting – be it jettisoning an earlier chosen profession, getting into new relationships, or creating a new email id 
. There is an element of fear, of trading the known for the unknown, but there is also the “tantalizing new”. There is a rashness in throwing away the comfort zone, and embracing discomfort but there is also the benefit of starting on a clean slate. Once you take the plunge into the unknown, you win that very instant – because the ecstasy of mastering one’s weakness/fear is far more than what any material success can give.
All said and done, how does this post lead to the genesis of “Arbit etc…. – Version 2″ ? Quite simply, WordPress did’nt let me continue the old blog with the unusable email account 
What the world can learn from my wisdom (read mistakes )…
- to keep a back up of contacts – there is provision for exporting/ importing contact information - that even I can understand
- to not link all internet accounts to one email id, its a typical trade off between short term & long term convenience
- to pray – that the email id does not get corrupted
Posted by lazeyblogger 
Posted by lazeyblogger 