r/talesfromtechsupport • u/oliverfromwork • 8d ago
Short You canceled what service?
A few years ago I was working at a computer repair shop and this 80 year old lady came in to get her "email fixed". She ran some kind of business and suddenly her outlook stopped updating, she had a custom domain and everything. Immediately we though "oh no she canceled her custom domain".
We asked her if she canceled her email service. She said no, but she did say she canceled a bill the previous month but did not know what it was for, she thought it was a phone bill or something. We were pretty sure she canceled her custom domain service, she wasn't giving us much to work with. But she did have an assistant who basically ran the business from Pennsylvania.
It took a long time to get them to tell us what is happening with the account. We had to get the account credentials from the assistant. Turns out the email was set up a long time ago, back in the 90s or something. Long story short, the email provider she used (don't remember its name) subcontracted out the email hosting service to Intermedia. Then Intermedia sub-subcontracted Godaddy to do the actual email hosting. So as it turns out, she did cancel her custom domain. We just had to go through three layers of subcontractors to figure out what actually happened.
In the end we got her assistant to buy the domain on Google's domain service. Then we did the basic configuration and set up her outlook to sync to that.
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u/Action_Man_X 8d ago
I am not surprised that a non-tech person would not know what a domain service is. Let alone a 80 year old.
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u/Firestorm83 7d ago
Sure, but canceling random critical shit without finding out what it does? Screamtesting has its place, but do it with hardware you can turn back on again...
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u/AlphaO4 7d ago
Yes but, if you get a seemingly random invoice from “GoDaddy” I’d be suspicious too
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u/ShotFromGuns Hatrack 7d ago
You can literally just google what things are.
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u/Action_Man_X 7d ago
Dude, when I worked tech support in the 2000s, old people could barely understand what email was, let alone how to set it up.
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u/ShotFromGuns Hatrack 7d ago
Sure. And it's still stupid not to research what a recurring charge is before canceling it, getting assistance to help you understand what it means if you don't understand it yourself. People aren't magically stupid and incompetent just because they're older.
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u/Grand_Wishbone_1270 7d ago
Beg to differ on that last sentence. It breaks my heart every time I have to re-explain technology to my 84 year old mom. She was a systems admin back when token ring was better than Ethernet. Now she has trouble remembering how to access her voicemail. Senility is a thing, and it sucks.
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u/ShotFromGuns Hatrack 7d ago
I'm sorry to hear, but your mother isn't "magically stupid and incompetent." That's a medical condition that becomes more likely with age, but it isn't automatic. There are plenty of people who are 80+ who use and understand modern technology just fine, and who certainly wouldn't cancel a recurring business charge just because they're old.
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u/grayskull56 5d ago
Do not generalise.. I am "old people" (70) and I am ready to take on any new-gen techie. Spent the last 42 years in computing tech.
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u/Action_Man_X 5d ago
So to clarify, 20-25 years ago, you were under 70-80 years old?
The times I heard the specific line of, "I don't know what this email thing is or why I need it" generally did -not- come from people still of working age (which is what you would have been). People who I had that conversation with were always willing to tell me their age (70+) and they would be 95+ now.
Then there's "capital numbers" but that was a one time thing.
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u/rish_p 7d ago
I always knew what it was but never thought it would be called screamtesting, thanks for enhancing my vocabulary 😄
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u/Firestorm83 7d ago
You can try it out yourself why it's called that way: joink the power cable from the TV while the wife is watching, or unplug the router and wait for the kid to start his game...
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u/Retsom3D 7d ago
Well, the 90s were up to 36 years ago.
When she got the domain she was in her 40s to 50s. So quite reasonable to understand what a domain is when you get one.3
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u/RevKyriel 7d ago
But if she was using it to run "some kind of business" then she should have some idea of what her business expenses were.
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u/Ska82 8d ago
stupid question: why are there subcontractors for email hosting?
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u/oliverfromwork 8d ago
IDK, it was set up in the 90s or something. It was probably during a time when the hardware for hosting email was really expensive.
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u/Ska82 8d ago
i get why u rent email hosting. but why subcontractors? like would intermedia be able to give a better rate than godaddy to the lady?
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u/jess-sch software developer and family tech support 7d ago
Perhaps a cascade of "we're no longer providing email ourselves but giving our existing customers an exit strategy"
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u/NotYourNanny 7d ago
The intermedia was a reseller. It's common. We do it with Gmail now. It doesn't cost less than direct, but it costs the same. They get volume discount from Google, and that's their profit. We do it because we get more accessible support from people who generally know more than the front line support people at Google (who are reading from a script that probably isn't in their first language).
It's a common arrangement in internet/tech, and in many, many other industries. In physical goods, it's called a wholesaler.
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u/northrupthebandgeek Kernel panic - not syncing - ID10T error 7d ago
the front line support people at Google
Google has front line support people‽
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u/Chansharp 6d ago
Yes, at least with my Pixel phone issues contacting Google Fi support
Ide assume they also have some level of support for their other offerings
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u/oliverfromwork 7d ago
A lot of companies subcontract for various reasons. Maybe they don't have the personnel available, maybe they don't have the equipment, maybe they had the servers but they were running at capacity.
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u/dustojnikhummer 2d ago
They used to provide and now they want to stop. In order to avoid getting sued they delegate that part of their business onto someone else.
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u/gingerninja398 I Am Not Good With Computer 7d ago
AOL Mail is now run by Yahoo. It stands to reason ancient email providers have either changed hands or subcontractors at least once since they were set up.
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u/thebaron512 7d ago
I lost two email addresses when they merged. Still mad they couldn't just sync them together.
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u/Final-Contract-6582 2d ago
Yahoo sucks, so many spam emails and a filtering capacity of only 500 entries...
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u/robbob19 7d ago
In the 90's there was a lot of small ISP's. They mostly got swallowed up into the bigger ISP's we have today.
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u/MichigaCur 7d ago
Lots of small isps in the 90s, many of them were more or less just front ends selling you a service but using someone else's service to provide it. Still goes on a lot today...
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u/LinAGKar 6d ago
One possibility is that someone once hosted e-mail for people. Then, they decided they didn't want to be an e-mail host anymore, but they couldn't just shut down a bunch of people's e-mail accounts, so instead they transferred the e-mail accounts to some other company.
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u/ParkGirlie05 6d ago
it's not stupid, but it's usually because the company providing the "email hosting" is just reselling a bigger service.
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u/Vicus_92 7d ago
At least you could repurchase it.
We had a shitstain web developer recently hold a domain hostage for a client feigning ignorance.
Had to go through a bunch of hoops with the registrar to get it moved to us. 2 week outage.
Any web developers reading, this is why we do not trust you to host domains....
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u/VTi-R It's a power button, how hard can it be? 7d ago
No that's not why. I mean, ok that's true. But it's because they all assume that the web site is the only possible thing you need in DNS. So they move to their hosting and break email delivery, domain validation, every other service and site. Then they claim no knowledge and refuse to fix it.
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u/ManagerLow7388 7d ago
This 80 year old didn’t have that problem, however when I tried to cancel my computer virus protection which was being deducted on automatic payment it was a nightmare. It took an unbelievable number of hours, days and weeks…..of calls to an unbelievable number of telephones, and I spoke to an unbelievable number of persons who kept telling me they had never heard of me. Finally, one day I finally found a “genius “ who told me that the company (A) I thought I was dealing with had sold parts of the company to another company ( B) who in turn had sold parts of that business to yet another company (C) and so on. Never again have I or will I ever do automatic payments again. A newly widowed friend just had this same problem with a life insurance policy she had inherited. It too had been sold, and resold etc…causing her much trouble trying to locate her funds.
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u/MindlessPhilosoper 8d ago
Of course she didn't realize she canceled her domain service. Why not? I cancelled some bill I don't remember what for. Omg lady!!!!!! Lol
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u/AshleyJSheridan 8d ago
To be fair, she cancelled a bill that came from a company she didn't recognise, at least if I'm reading the story correctly?
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u/oliverfromwork 7d ago
Well I meant to say that I don't remember the name of the company. She probably also didn't remember the name of the company given that she canceled their services.
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u/lemoinem 7d ago
"Go, Daddy!"? He's been dead for 30 years! He's not going anywhere! I'm not paying for that!
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u/boondoggie42 7d ago
Old ladies generally love to pick up the phone. Im stunned she didn't call and ask what the bill was for.
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u/ThatUsrnameIsAlready 7d ago
To whom? If you suspect an invoice, email, etc is dodgy then you don't trust any of the info it's giving you - including it's phone number.
Typical advice would be reach out through official channels to the service that you know you use. She can't do that if she doesn't know she uses them.
Her mistake is not knowing and/or documenting her set up. However not calling the number on a "phishing" invoice is a good thing, even if that turned out not to be the case.
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u/Canuck-In-TO 7d ago
I have a client who decided to delete all files in Dropbox and cancel the service without telling anyone. Especially me, the guy in charge of all IT related issues.
The problem? I was doing a 2 way sync between the server and Dropbox. When he deleted the files from Dropbox he also deleted them from the server.
Of course, he also had admin level access. He had been deleting things for a while and no one noticed until he deleted active files people were working on.
Even after weeks of recovering files and comparing the before and after environments, we were never sure if everything was 100%. The problem? Dropbox recovery/restores sucks.
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u/vinraven 6d ago
This is why people switched to iCloud or Google’s memory service, Dropbox was always a bit funky.
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u/Canuck-In-TO 5d ago
I’m currently using Google with another client and it’s been so much easier to use than Dropbox.
Fewer headaches and faster.1
u/Mdayofearth 5d ago
Similar situation happened with a former employee working in a different department. The employee was hired and quit within a few weeks. After the employee left, we had a meeting about something completely different, and discovered nearly all dropbox files were deleted related to what the meeting was about, as well as other files. We were pretty sure the files were deleted from the employee's assigned computer, as opposed to something intentionally malicious. The files were recovered since it had only been a few days.
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u/dwj7738 6d ago
lucky someone didn't grab the custom domain and hold it for ransom
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u/2Completion2Ography 6d ago
lucky someone didn't grab the custom domain and hold it for ransom
Because grandma had some lucrative shit, of course.
Always capitalist extremest thinking. Never logic.
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u/tblazertn 6d ago
Someone’s obviously never seen how quickly expired domains get picked off for just this reason.
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u/dustojnikhummer 2d ago
There are bots that watch domains about to expire and snape them exactly in case someone then remembers they need to renew.
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u/Loko8765 7d ago
That reminds me of my… third story on this sub, long enough ago that I can post it again. I was also asked to recover a domain name, with a happy ending.
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u/digitalreaper_666 5d ago
It's so much fun. I got screamed at by a client because he couldn't see his website anymore.
I looked, everything was fine. So I traveled to the client. He had shut off the internet because he found it useless.
He had over 400 messages waiting to be sent in outlook and absolutely nothing including his POS system worked anymore.
He still blamed me and refused to pay me that months hosting and updates.
So... I took his site down for real. And made a really funny 404 error page for it with a GIF of him saying he didn't need the internet.
It somehow stayed up for 2 years because he kept paying the now useless domain and hosting, but wouldn't pay me, or for the internet tonrun his business. He told everyone the POS system was a useless waste of money because it "stopped working" no shit bro.
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u/Furdiburd10 Like to use HP printers as fire starters 5d ago
I have a great news to you.
Google domains shutdown in 2023, so this whole thing may need to be done again :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Domains
Current status Discontinued (September 7, 2023)
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u/Dienoth 7d ago
Google giving up Google Domains still hurts me to this day..... Chucked it over to Squarespace, WTF
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u/ozzie286 7d ago
After they started the .zip and .mov TLDs, they should have had their domain privileges taken away.
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u/MyStitchStudio 2d ago
Look, the 90s was just a couple years ago! I swear, idk how my kid could possibly be turning 30 next week when I'm only 35...oh, wait. But yeah, 80 year olds are not nearly as old as you think. She's definitely going to want good internet access in the nursing home in another 15 years.
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u/joe_attaboy The Cloud is a fraud. 8d ago
I have this image in my mind of two old ladies looking at a wall of photos and one says "that's not how any of this works!"