I am not a huge fan of Bell Sympatico services.  It was always a trial to obtain the required assistance from them when something went awry with my email service, but it has become increasingly, a harrowing experience to contact them and I do it only when I have no other choice; when everything I have attempted to do on my own to clarify and ameliorate the situation has resulted in failure.

Now, if help is required by a technical specialist - always offshore, geographically located in India where those keen young men patiently listen to the problem and do their purported best to sort out the problem - assail one's ears with sometimes unintelligible speech one's brain races to interpret before responding.  Latterly, the request and requirement to allow them access to controlling your personal computer to solve the issue has proven to be an additional experience better left uncriticized since there appears to be little other option available to the client.

A month or so back when my old computer collapsed into a state of mechanical failure and I was forced to undergo a total rescue operation I lost all my original settings, my files and whatever had been familiar to me in the process, although I did manage to restore the hard disk and bring up entirely new software programs which I then had to set about reformatting.  While my former data is all still on the hard disk, nothing appears visible until and unless a search is undertaken, which I mostly launched to recapture my photograph files.

I discovered, however, that my Outlook email program had somehow also been affected.  I was no longer able to send or receive, and that launched my original call to Sympatico for assistance.  I wanted to be able to recapture my Outlook files, some of which I wanted to maintain; for example, those which contained years' worth of downloaded blog entries, now nowhere to be seen.  The technician restored my service but not my files.

I called again and this time the technician said he could send all those files back to me, but then disappeared off the line after saying he would call back, but never did.  The third technician I spoke to after a hiatus of some weeks - to whom I spoke because my service, sending and receiving had somehow become suspended again - agreed those files were there (I had seen their presence myself going to the Sympatico site and looking up and signing onto my account) and he would have them returned to my account.  What was returned was the missing files sure enough, along with tens of thousands of emails I had read over the past two years and deleted.

I have been sorting through thme ever since.  And, once again, though he assured me my service had been fully restored, there have been no incoming emails and I haven't been able to send anything out.  So much for Bell Sympatico.