Writing Boots

On communication, professional and otherwise.

Waiting for Google no more

12.02.2011 by David Murray // 5 Comments

Google PR people never got back to me on my hysterical Monday request to talk to a human being about whether all my videos are about to be deleted from the universe.

As hard as it is to imagine, maybe they had bigger fish to fry.

But I'm not some dumb jamoke either, so I reached out on Wednesday to Laura Hunter Thomas, an old speechwriting acquaintance from Chicago who recently went to work for Google, in internal executive comms.

Or, "Saint Laura" as I've come to call her.

"I'm still a newbie at Google," Saint Laura wrote, "but I will do my best to figure out what the heck is happening."

Her own requests for help weren't returned by a PR department that apparently does indeed have bigger fish to fry. But Saint Laura, herself no expert in the vagaries of YouTube accounts—she's a nitwit writer too, remember!—did some digging on her own and we set up a time to talk.

Ahead of our call, she sent me a thread she found, of Google/YouTube victims trying to solve similar problems to mine. I wrote her back:

Laura, this might as well be written in Polish and then converted into a Chinese font.

Here was the most helpful suggestion I found: 汉字  /漢字 汉字  /漢字 .

I know. What a fucking baby I am, right?

So Saint Laura calls me at the appointed hour, and we have an odd conversation that involves the necessary and increasingly hilarious repeating of the stupid name of the account in question, slimmyfucker.

And it was so strange, what happened. I don't think Saint Laura told me anything I didn't already know. Maybe she made me understand once and for all that accounts and channels are separate and that an account can be conceivably closed without the channel disappearing.

But mainly, she just talked to me. She asked me if I have my videos backed up on my computers. It occurred to me for the very first time that—why yes, for Chrissakes, I guess I do! My shoulders dropped nearly to my ass with relief.

We then typed in a password or two. We discovered together—we came up with a shared strong hunch, is more like it—that probably what would happen to my channels if they canceled the slimmyfucker account as they threatened to do next Saturday—was nothing. Which is fine with me, because I have access to both my channels through other e-mail accounts.

"I'm starting to get that warm and happy feeling coming over me," I told her, and Saint Laura laughed. (Saint Laura has a great sense of humor!) She added that Google realizes it has customer service issues, and is working to improve them. She was sure to point out that this was just a friend helping a friend and that this was no kind of technical support. But now I have someone to call if it all goes wrong and one of my channels does go missing.

It's Friday afternoon. It's been a wild week. I'm ready for a cocktail. But everything already has a gauzy glow.

I told you all I needed was to talk to a human being.

And oh, what a human being I talked to.

Laura, you're a saint.

Now google forth and multiply.

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // Google, Laura Hunter Thomas, You Tube

Waiting for Google

11.30.2011 by David Murray // Leave a Comment

Gingerly, I click "post" to share an e-mail that I sent to Google's e-mail address on Tuesday, under the subject line, "The Pending Deletion of a Journalist's YouTube Account."

I'm doing so, because I told them I would:

Dear Media Relations Team:

Before I begin: You are absolutely not the right person to be answering this e-mail. Except that I plan to publish this letter on my blog later this week, along with a full account of the Google’s response, and the (hopeful) resolution.

I write you as a freelance journalist who writes for The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and other local and national publications; I’m also editor of Vital Speeches of the Day magazine. And yes, I blog about my life and work, at writingboots.typepad.com.

I write you in a spirit of sincere bewildered desperation the likes of which I haven’t known since I read Franz Kafka, back in my college days.

If that sounds melodramatic, I ask you how it’s possible to be overdramatic about the prospect of having much of one’s documented professional, personal and family history swept out of the universe, not by a wildfire or a flood, but by a corporation that actually has as its motto, “Don’t be evil.” (My motto is, “Don’t be one of those pseudo-literary pipsqueaks who invokes Kafka every time something goes wrong with a large institution.” Ah, we all slip up sometimes.)

To the point: I got the following e-mail at 5:19 a.m. on Saturday.

The YouTube account for dmurrayil@earthlink.net will be deleted on 10 Dec 2011 if you do not click the link below to upgrade your account:

http://www.youtube.com/signin?username=slimmyfucker&feature=neup3

As a reminder, you created a YouTube account for dmurrayil@earthlink.net but haven't completed the signup process. Complete your registration and upgrade your account by clicking the link above.

Once you've upgraded, you'll be able to log in to YouTube using the same account that you use for all other Google sites.

If you're having trouble and need some help, please visit the YouTube Help Centre.

Thank you,

The YouTube Team

Here’s the situation: I’m neither an early adopter or a late adopter, but what I call a just-in-time adopter. What do I mean? I hate to adopt new communication technologies, because my life is rich and full and varied and confusing and overwhelming enough, and I see every new technology as the straw that could break this camel’s brittle back. But I also loath being late—to anything—and so the moment that a technological innovation appears to me to be a permanent part of American life, well then I scramble like a man on fire to get into it.

In the case of YouTube, this mad spasm, along with my own technical ham-handedness, drove me to create three or four accounts, all around 2008 or 2009.

Well, actually two accounts, but with several different passwords and usernames.

I think.

(What’s the difference between “accounts” and “channels”?)

To tell you the truth, the only thing I really know is that I’ve created two channels—youtube.com/vitalspeeches and youtube.com/kleekonk—that, if “deleted,” as your e-mail threatens (or appears to threaten), would constitute a devastating loss. After all, I’ve curated about 150 contemporary and historical speeches for the Vital Speeches channel, and I’ve uploaded 142 original videos to my personal channel, kleekonk. Many thousands of people have viewed these videos, and thousands continue to rely on them for wildly varying professional and personal needs. (When I adopt a technology, I really adopt it.)

Anyway: I narrowly escaped the loss of one or both of these channels—again, I think—a few months ago, when another of my channels was threatened with deletion (I’m pretty sure). How did I pull this off? Over several multiple-hour sessions, I spent at least one whole working day trying to work through your FAQs and other online help-sites. I conducted every tried-and-true and experimental operation to consolidate my accounts. Nothing worked.

Finally, near frustrated tears, I called Google’s corporate office and expressed myself in all the dizzying detail you see above. I was told flatly that the company does help people with these issues over the phone. I pleaded: Can you help me, or transfer me to someone who can? “No,” she said. She didn’t hang up. She fell silent. Leaving me to say, after some more long seconds, “Okay.”

(Are you starting to see what I mean with the shopworn Kafka reference?)

I saved my channel once (I think) and regained my temporarily lost ability to post videos to it with an inelegant and convoluted workaround that employs wife’s work e-mail account to access the kleekonk channel.

But now I face this new threat.

Do you see that I really do need to sort this out with a fellow human being, on the telephone?

The essential question that person could help me answer—and as I imagine him or her, he or she is warm and good-natured, with a sense of humor, yes, but mostly a mind to get on with her day—would be this: If my “account” expires, does the channel associated with disappear, or does it stay up, as long as it is associated with another account? I don’t care if the unfortunately-named “slimmyfucker” account expires; I only care that my YouTube channels, accessible to me through other accounts, stay up. 

That’s my question. Here’s my request: Tell me everything is going to be okay. And if it’s not, tell me how to fix it.

I’ve tried to figure this out online. I have failed, perhaps through my own incompetence. But I know Google recognizes that technical savvy does not describe the average YouTube user, because on my last weary trip to the “YouTube Help Centre,” I was offered “Help Videos,” and instructed, insultingly from my point of view, “Do what you do best. Watch our help videos to learn the basics.”

I think you’ll agree, they haven’t yet made a video to help the likes of me.

I need a person.

Please help.

Sincerely,

David Murray

—
David Murray
1508 W. Ohio #3
Chicago, IL 60622
312-455-2921
writingboots.typepad.com
vsotd.com

I sent that at 10:35 Monday morning, and on Monday afternoon I returned to Google's press site, looking for a phone number to follow up. There, I was instructed, "For non-urgent matters, you can call and leave a message: +1.650.930.3555."

There were no instructions for non-non-urgent matters.

I left a message anyway.

And as yet, I've received no response.

December 10 is only 11 days away.

What would you do in my position?

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // account deleted, customer support, Google, Help Centre, press center, public relations, YouTube

Guessers gather at Davos to guess together

02.12.2010 by David Murray // 5 Comments

Kurt Vonnegut wrote an essay not long before he died in which he called the world's leaders what they are: the "guessers," on whose grand public hunches rest the fate of us all. Aristotle, Ivan the Terrible and Hitler were three of the variously successful guessers from history that Vonnegut named.

But the guessing goes on, wrote Vonnegut, even after the information revolution:

Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership for so long—for all of human experience so far—that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on, because now it is their turn to guess and be listened to.

I thought of that essay as I read a Huffington Post piece called "Davos Confidential," written by Eric Schmidt, simultaneously a direct supervisor of the information revolution and the guesser-in-chief at Google.

He's at Davos right now.

He starts out on a somewhat defensive note:

It's easy to sneer at Davos as a place where the rich, powerful and famous come to talk to each other and arrogantly put the world to rights. But there has been little sign of arrogance at recent gatherings. Nor any settled view of how to overcome the challenges our world faces. If there is a global conspiracy underway at Davos, no one has yet let me in on the secret.

Instead Davos mirrors the uncertainty in the world in general. The real story this year was not arrogance but anxiety over how we could channel turbulent global forces in a more positive direction so that everyone gains.

Oh, no. So these days our guess is as good as the guessers'?

Back to Vonnegut, who listed some of the influential guesses we've been laboring under in recent years.

The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn’t be poor, so their children should pay the consequences. 

That's correct.

The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its people.

That’s correct.

The free market will do that.

That’s correct.

The free market is an automatic system of justice.

That’s correct.

And back to Schmidt, who concludes his essay by talking about the "principles central to Davos," which sound familiar:

Principles such as the benefits of free trade, free societies and free speech and, above all, open collaboration between business people and politicians who recognize that with freedom should come responsibility. Yes, the world has critical challenges, especially in 2010, but I believe that in these Davos values lie our solutions. It's this hope and optimism that will ensure I keep coming back as long as I am invited.

Davos values? Hope? Optimism?

You know what it sounds like?

It sounds like he's guessing.

Categories // Uncategorized Tags // CEO, Davos, Eric Schmidt, Google, guessers, Kurt Vonnegut

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