What Yahoo and John Wilkes Booth Have In Common
I’ll give you a hint: they’re both EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEVIL.
Also, I’m guessing that if I called up John Wilkes Booth to find out why my website was abruptly shut down, he’d be about as helpful, friendly, intelligent, and understanding as Yahoo’s “Customer Service”. And I do mean current Booth, i.e., the pile of moldering bones he is right now.
So, yeah, if you’re wondering what happened to my website last week…SO AM I! No one will tell me! I am so sad! We were hosting it on Yahoo’s servers because we figured, hey, they’re a big strong company, nothing bad could happen there, right? Turns out what we didn’t know is that there are no PEOPLE working at Yahoo. If something goes wrong, ONLY COMPUTERS will respond to your frantic woeful emails, and they apparently can’t read very well.
Also, according to Yahoo’s rules, evidently they can take down your website at any time, with no warning, and then never tell you why, refuse to give you back your data, ignore your existence, and bite the heads off kittens. It’s right there in their “Terms of Service,” which they’ll keep referring to as if they’re expecting you to go: “Oh, OK, then I guess you do have a right to rob me of hundreds of pages of data that I’ve spent three years building. I should have thought of that before complaining! Silly me!”
Here’s how I found all this out:
[last Tuesday, on the phone:]
Mom: blah blah blah blah blah oh by the way your website is down blah blah–
me: WHAT?
Mom: blah? blah?
me: My website is down?!?! Was it the Brazilians again? Are they back? OMG! I can’t believe this! I have to go.
[hangs up. dials.]
Adam: Hello, this is Adam at work in his very important office getting very important work done.
me: rooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!
Adam: Oh no, what’s wrong with your website now?
me: It’s gone! Nothing there! Tragedy! Help! Sad! Why does the internet hate me?
Adam: Here, let’s log in to your account…oh, hey, they won’t let me log in…whoa, it looks like your whole account has been deactivated.
me: ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
[hangs up. dials.]
me: Help! Sad!
Yahoo “Customer Care”: Nope. Can’t help you. Don’t feel like it. Nope. No idea. Can’t tell you why. Nope. No website for you. No explanation. No actual human you can talk to. All our managers are in an "important meeting." Yeah, I’m totally lying, because what are you going to do? Nope. You’ll have to email the Department of Blah. No, you can’t call them. No, you can only send them five hundred desperate emails and no, they will never respond usefully to any of them. Also, we hate you. And puppies. We hate puppies.
[hangs up.]
[flings self on couch. eats entire pint of Ben and Jerry’s Fossil Fuel. sobs until Adam comes home. repeat for next three days.]
We did pretty much everything we could possibly do to try to get my data back so we could move it elsewhere, but in the end we had to spend the whole weekend rebuilding my website from nothing, because Yahoo wouldn’t even give my data back, or acknowledge that we’d asked for it, or send us anything but automated useless nonsense like “ah, yes, we know spam is frustrating; here are some ways to combat it!” Awesome. THANKS VERY MUCH.
And I still don’t know why they did this! Literally, no one will give me any sort of reason! Maybe the head of Yahoo is the world’s biggest Mary Shelley fan and was enormously offended by my last post. HMMMMM.
So parts of my website might still be missing, but I’m trying to get it all fixed…sorry about that! Feel free to send angry letters to Yahoo about it. 😉 I’m sure once they hear from my seven outraged fans, they’ll be consumed with shame and guilt and repentance. Don’t you think?
On the plus side, since I couldn’t write a blog and I couldn’t muster the energy to do anything else like exercise or write, I ended up watching a truckload of old classic movies. So now I can say that I’ve seen Grand Hotel, The Man Who Knew Too Much, Lover Come Back, On the Waterfront, The Magnificent Seven, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and The Big Sleep. :-) I know, I’m totally not kidding about how woebegone and pathetic I was.
And it was so sad, too, because I finally finished Team of Rivals and I was SOO excited to come on here and tell you all about it! OMG! Not only is the whole thing fantastic, this book is seriously worth reading for the last chapter alone! MURRRRRRRRRRRRRDER! Dastardly villains! Blood everywhere! Craziness!
OK, did you know that there were actually three assassinations planned for the day Lincoln was killed? Booth and his co-conspirators decided they had to completely disrupt the government, so they plotted to kill Lincoln, Vice President Andrew Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward all at the same time. !!!!!! Why didn’t I know about this? That sounds like important AND interesting U.S. history!
I can’t decide whether to tell you all about it, because I don’t want to spoil the suspense of the book. But let’s just say that the dude shows up to try and kill Seward—at the exact moment that Booth is going to kill Lincoln at the Ford Theatre—and ends up leaving a total bloodbath behind him. The doctor said he couldn’t believe how much damage had been done by one man, and how much blood was all over everything. Ack! Oh no!
Seward was originally Lincoln’s rival for the nomination, but after five years of working together, they’d become really close friends, and Seward kept saying that he thought Lincoln was the best president they could possibly have, and Lincoln totally loved him, and awww.
I will give away one thing [SPOILER…um, can there be spoilers for history?], which you might know anyway since he buys Alaska two years later, but Seward actually survives the attack, although he’s horribly wounded. And I share that because I want to quote the part of the book that made me cry and cry and cry (and this is even before I was emotionally unbalanced by the theft of my website):
From Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin:
News of Lincoln’s death was withheld from Seward. The doctors feared that he could not sustain the shock. On Easter Sunday, however, as he looked out the window toward Lafayette Park, he noticed the War Department flag at half-mast. “He gazed awhile,” Noah Brooks reported, “then, turning to his attendant,” he announced, “The President is dead.” The attendant tried to deny it, but Seward knew with grim certainty. “If he had been alive he would have been the first to call on me,” he said, “but he has not been here, nor has he sent to know how I am, and there’s the flag at halfmast.” He lay back on the bed, “the great tears coursing down his gashed cheeks, and the dreadful truth sinking into his mind.” His good friend, his captain and chief, was dead.
— pp. 744-745, Team of Rivals
Oh, SAD! It’s so true! Lincoln would have been the first to come see if Seward was OK! What a sad way to figure out that your best friend is dead! Can you imagine? Poor Seward. Poor Lincoln. I can’t believe how sad I am about something that happened 150 years ago. My goodness.
So what have we learned today? That you should read Team of Rivals. That ice cream can fix almost everything. And that you should never ever do business with Yahoo! Run away! Save yourselves! 🙂
Here’s what my mom had to say about all this: “You know, my mother used to say that a smart girl would marry a butcher, because then you’d always have meat on the table. But aren’t you glad you didn’t marry a butcher?” It’s true. I married a vegetarian computer software guy instead, and THANK GOD, because otherwise I’d still have no website, and I’d probably have eaten about two hundred cheeseburgers last week, trying to cheer myself up. Yay Adam for saving me from such a fate! :) :) :) Best husband ever. 🙂
Next week: back to cheerful blogs! And pictures of Sunshine! And happy TV talk! I’m so sad about Adam Carolla being out on Dancing, but I’m starting to hope for a Kristi-Shannon final two. They’re both SO amazing!
OH! OK, one happy TV note! Did you hear did you hear? Well, hopefully you’ve already heard that Joss Whedon is putting together a new show for next season (EEEEEEEEEE BEST TV NEWS IN THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD!) but the new exciting news about that is that he just cast Tahmoh Penikett in it — that’s Helo! From Battlestar Galactica! OMG OMG! At last, something to truly obsess about that doesn’t involve glittery costumes and paso dobles. :-) I can’t wait!
Quote of the Day:
Jerry: “My brother, the jungle surgeon. He was a real doctor.”
Carol: “Was?”
Jerry: “Yes, he went into the interior to treat this tribe of sick natives. Got them back on their feet, restored their health…and appetites…discovered too late that they were cannibals.”
— Lover Come Back 