Back in the old days, when I was using a humble PC running that nasty Windows XP, my e-mail client of choice was Thunderbird.  No susprise there – it was far better than Outlook Express.  However, when I finally managed to pull myself clear of the painful Microsoft experience and bought myself a Mac, I found myself using Mail, the built-in mail client Apple have made.  Its clean interface made the daily chore of checking e-mails a pleasure, and its seamless integration with everything else was bliss.  I even found I could extend the standard functionality with a few plugins, which improved the spam-handling significantly.  All was well.  Apple have done a fantastic job.

At least, until just recently.  For no apparent reason, Mail has started quitting on launch.  I open it, it starts contacting the mail servers for new mail, and then quits.  A small frustration, admittedly, and relaunching it seemed to convince it that it could work.  But today I had to restart Mail at least three times.  I’ve taken out all the plugins and anything that might have been upsetting it, but it still crashes.

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Back in December I picked up the telephone to call someone, only to find that we had been disconnected.  The cause, apparently, was that there was an outstanding balance on our account, and the line had been cut off because of it.  We could receive calls and use the internet, but not dial out.  This all stemmed from an issue we had had paying our previous bill, which we ended up paying in two lots because they wouldn’t let us set up a direct debit.  The BT system clearly got confused, seeing two payments, and refunded the second one.  There was no indication that this was a problem, and I presumed from that that I would be able to pay the remainder with the next bill.  I was wrong.

There was nothing on the BT web site when I logged in saying that the line had been stopped, nor that the outstanding balance was a problem.  I nevertheless paid the outstanding £22 immediately, and expected to be reconnected within 24 hours, as per the recorded message we get directed to when trying to dial out.  No such luck.  It’s now the second week in January, and we’re still not connected.  The money has been paid, it’s on my bank statement, and it registers on my BT account too that there is no outstanding balance.  But the line is still blocked.  A strongly worded letter was sent back in December, on the day we were cut off, but I have yet to receive any correspondence from them in return.

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Yes, yes, I know.  I’m three days late.  Well never mind, it’s not the end of the world, and at least I got round to it eventually.

In fact, part of the reason for the lateness of this post is due to the time I’ve been spending doing other (arguably more important) things.  Our New Year’s Eve party was a blast, with a good gaggle of guests cramming into our lounge to see the dawn of 2008.  In fact, so eager were we to savour the 1st January 2008 that we didn’t actually get to bed until at least 3:30am.  People just kept on talking, and we couldn’t get rid of them.  Actually it was a lot of fun, and we both really appreciated having so many people round.

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