Sunday 8 January 2012

What I have learnt about life this week...


I have recently been going back over my family tree on ancestry.co.uk, which I had abandoned previously last year, (out of boredom if I'm honest), but for some reason its perked my interested again, and I'm back in the game...with all the retired women desperately searching for something to do with their lives. (No offence to anyone who does enjoy that sort of thing, I mean I do it myself for gods sake, but it does seem to be mostly women in their later years on those sorts of websites for some reason, I suppose most people my age have a life...but I digress). Before I could start myself up again, I had to log in, which I hadn't done for nearly a whole year. I couldn't for the life of me remember my password...or my username...and not even which email I used to register (I seem to collect emails) so, if you understand the basic function of a situation like this, IE forgot username, they will email it to you, forgot password they will email it to you, you will understand I seemed pretty screwed.

I can be a bit passive aggressive to support service people (online obviously, I wouldn't be able to speak to them by phone or in person), but then who isn't? The point of you being in a support service section of any company or website is usually that something has gone wrong. Yes, they like to pretend that people ring them up or email them to say what a wonderful service they are providing, but really, no one ever does that. No, you talk to a support service person for negative reasons, which makes you angry and frustrated before you've even started the conversation. But I thought I was quite polite, pity that it didn't seem to get me anywhere though.

This is how the email played out...

Customer
Is there anyway you could help me access my account by reminding me of my password or the email I used without me remembering either one?

I have many many emails, and many many passwords for different things, and since I haven’t used this account in a while, I have no idea which email I used, which password I used or what my username was. I tried several I thought I might have used, but no luck.

I can give you my name, my address, the last digits of the debit card I used previously when I had membership to this website, answers to any questions I may have selected when I set up the account. Anything, just not the email I used, the password or username. Please help me. It took me a very long time to make my family tree and I’ll be gutted if I’ve lost it.

Now remember, I DO NOT KNOW which email I used...which is what I have actually stated above, and therefore obviously are using a different email to communicate with...

Member Solutions
Ancestry.co.uk
We appreciate your message.

I unfortunately could not find an account under this email address or name. If you have signed up with a different email address or post may I ask you to send it to me so that I can help you further. You can also call us at 800 404 9723 and we would be glad to assist in resolving this situation.

If there is anything else with which we might assist you, please let us know.
To which I replied with...

Customer
My message was either not read correctly or ignored completely. There is no sense in telling me there is no such account under this address, because I don't know what email I used, that's the point...
Could someone actually read my initial message please.

I did not get a reply in the time it took me to go through all the emails I could remember, with no luck and then attempted getting into as many old Internet accounts as I could think of, one of which had my old email address in my account information, which I then got into and found my ancestry registration. The reason I didn't do that before was because I stupidly thought it would be much quicker to just politely ask ancestry for some help accessing my account.

I know for most people this will be the most boring post in the world, as they have to deal with stuff like this continuously on a daily basis, but as a young person who doesn't generally have to deal with support services of any kind, I have learnt a valuable lesson, comedians aren't aways making crap up to sound funny, some of it is real.

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