Thursday 28 March 2013

Once Upon a Time in Google Space

Once upon a time in a land not so far away there was a blogger named Ron. One afternoon he accidentally deleted his Reading Watchers Watching blog essay on Ethnographic Film on Blogger. He accidentally hit the wrong link, delete rather than edit, in Blogger Posts and whoosh, his blog was gone. He tried to figure out how to undelete the blog but he couldn't so he went to Google and goggled, "how dear all seeing and all knowing one one do I undelete a deleted blogger blog"? Several helpful links appeared just like magic on the Web. Ron read them. They told him to go to Dashboard and hit undelete. And Ron tried. The problem, however, was that his Blogger Dashboard did not have an undelete.

Mystified he moved on to plan B. He contacted the all powerful Big Brother Google Wizard at Google Central. And surprise, surprise he actually received a reply from a real person behind the Google screen. And the Google Wizard said to him, "hit the undelete button on your Blogger Dashboard". This might have been good form letter advice except that Ron's Blogger Dashboard didn't, as we already know don't we dear readers, have an undelete button.

So he wrote Big Brother Google Wizard again. This time he sent them a screen shot showing conclusively that he didn't have an undelete button on his Blogger Dashboard. Once again the Google Wizard responded in a cliched form letter way asking Ron "did you look for undelete on the right side of your Blogger Dashboard". He replied, "yes I did but as I said earlier it wasn't there". Then the Wizard asked whether Ron logged in to a wrong Blogger account? Ron replied, "No. I only have one blogger account so it would be difficult, to say the least, for me to log into another Blogger account". These presumably are the standard form responses they send out to everyone who writes. I the all seeing narrator know this because I used to work at a cable TV company (TCI) and whenever we got a trouble call from a customer we were told by the Olympians on high to run through the gamut of canned responses. The canned response at the top? Do you have your TV tuned to Channel 3? Most of the time this actually solved the problem.

So we are at the end our sad tale. It looks like poor Ron has no other choice other than to put his Blogger account on hold and make his way to the Ruby City of WordPress. It will take, I the narrator suspect, him some time for him to move everything from Blogger to WordPress. Hopefully it won't be too difficult for him. Then, I am told he thinks he will also close down everything google he uses. This may be an incredible hassle but it seems to me, the narrator, that this is the most appropriate way I can think of for Ron to thank Google for everything they have done for him. An even better thank you perhaps would be: Google bondage, up yours. Unhappy unhappy happy ending.

Postscript: I finally got my missing blog back this morning (see above). Apparently, Google was telling me one thing while I was asking about another. "Communication Breakdown". So I finally got me a happy ending at least for the moment. Thank you Google Blogger Central.

2 comments:

  1. Please look back to the Help Forum where I have been trying to help you with the problem as you described it, and having determeined that we were talking about two different things, passed the request along to another helper knowledgeable about finding a deleted POST. He has now posted a method of finding your lost POST.

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  2. Thanks. I got it back thanks to your and your colleagues help.

    ReplyDelete