I had yesterday completed sorting through and deleting the fourteen thousand old emails that in the past several years I had gone through, retained some, and deleted most of that were downloaded to my Outlook email account through Bell Sympatico, and thought, Eureka! it's done and now I can call Sympatico back to have my receiving and transmission of emails restored.  I hadn't wanted all those hoary old emails downloaded, only the files containing those that I had wished to retain which had mysteriously disappeared, and which two previous calls and explanations to other technicians had resulted in nothing but frustration.

Those calls for assistance from Bell representative-technicians offshore are invariably exercises in frustration, for me and for the people employed by Sympatico.  Their English language-proficiency is likely good by international standards but my ability to accurately and swiftly interpret that language appears rather deficient at best.  That, and the faintness of the connection, requiring me to ask that instructions or recommendations be repeated adding to the general aura of annoyance, though my interlocutors do make a courageous attempt at courtesy and resilience.

My call of last Saturday with Sani Antoni resulted in that massive download and the subsequent discovery that my email functionality still had not been restored.  Yesterday's call proved no more fruitful.  Initially I thought I'd do it differently and log onto Symantec's 'live-talk' session upon which 'Dietrich' confidently introduced himself to me and assured me that my little problem would be speedily resolved.  His instructions to take me through the authorization process to take over my computer failed due to time-outs and he appeared to have given up in frustration, severing his connection with me.

Upon which I felt compelled to sacrifice further precious time, calling the technician-assistance help line once again, at which Moises responded to me, and our conversation was clear, his English impeccable, and he most amenable.  He discovered that the previous technician had left those fourteen thousand emails in my Symantec account and his theory was that it was overloaded as a result, restraining the system from working properly, thus the answer to my problem with receiving and sending emails.

I explained mine was an old computer, creaky and slow, and he exhibited great patience working with it.  He managed to delete all the unwanted emails that had been accumulated, just as I had from my computer; this took considerable time during which he also went into my Misconfig and made a few adjustments there (I had, of course, signed Sympatico's exemption from responsibility) and informed me my computer would work much more expeditiously now.

In his zeal to remove all the accumulated emails in all the folders at the Symantec site he also deleted a folder of junk, but not before I realized that the 'junk' was comprised of over two weeks' worth of legitimate emails that I had been awaiting that hadn't been deposited in my email account for me to view and review as should be done.  In that split second between my realization of this strange phenomenon where some unauthorized glitch had occurred bypassing normal delivery that deposited incoming email to junk stature, Moise had successfully deleted them all.

When all his thoughtful and expert attempts to tweak the system to ensure that my Outlook account would begin operating properly had been exhausted, he finally apologized, said he had done all that he could, that everything technical appears to be in correct order and the only explanation he could think of what that Bell's server was down.  In fact, my husband informed me later that while he was watching a news segment on his laptop a notice to that effect suddenly came on screen and I thought !Aha! perhaps Moises was right.

This morning up I went to look at my email, in the hope that miraculously functionality would have been restored - nothing again.  Not one single, solitary email arrived in my Outlook mailbox.  I thought that if I opened a new identity last night, it might help, but that little attempt to bypass the problem whatever it is, was hugely unsuccessful, as well.

If Bell cannot solve the problem, why am I paying them a handsome monthly fee for service?