Our dependency on technology becomes rather alarming.

If a global disaster strikes and you live in the country in an 18-century house, you will be able to get some firewood in the forest, bring water in a bucket from the river, catch a rabbit with a snare made of your suspenders, and roast that rabbit in your fireplace, or, at worst, on a barbecue in your backyard. And you will be able to have a proper outhouse of the system our great-grandfathers used.

If a global disaster strikes and you live in the city, on the 18th floor of an apartment building, you are helpless. There is no water source, no way of using the washroom and no way to cook food (most certainly your cooker uses gas or electricity).

What I wanted to say is, today my Microsoft Outlook Connector suddenly stopped working.

I have a Hotmail account. It is about 12 years old. It is the second e-mail address I got in my life. For many years it suited all my needs.

When I had to switch to Outlook Express, it took me about 1 minute to hitch it on to Hotmail, and everything worked perfectly.

About a year ago I started using full-scale Outlook, just because some illogical behaviour of Windows prevented me from doing something I needed, otherwise. It took me about 1 minute to hitch it on to Hotmail, and everything worked perfectly. Outlook has some extremely strange bugs but I eventually got used to them.

Then Microsoft decided that this is not good enough.

They introduced Outlook Connector and made everyone use it. It did not enable me to “manage all my e-mail accounts with ease“. It was glitchy and slow, but what could I do?

Today my Microsoft Outlook Connector suddenly stopped working, and I cannot do anything about it. I don’t even know where to look. It’s not exactly a disaster, like a power outage when your only options to cook food are an electrical cooker and a microwave oven. I will survive. I will check my Hotmail messages using  Web as I had been doing for many years. But the unpleasant thought nags at me, that, if something more serious  happens, I will be helpless.

I hate being helpless. The accounting / time management / billing software I use for my business I developed all by myself so I know how to fix it if something breaks (or if I just need it to do something new, like a new time usage summary report, and in a small business this happens practically every day).

So I tried to fix the problem. I put some stuff into the system registry as this article suggests, but it did not help. Microsoft says that “they are working on the problem”. Another article suggests deleting all your .pst files and then doing something else, but this sounds like chopping off one’s head to get rid of a head cold. The only thing I can do is check my Hotmail messages via the web and pray that the MS sorts out the problem.

That’s rather annoying. I hate being helpless.

———

Later update. It’s working now! Either MS fixed the problem, or the magic tambourine act helped, or both. I still think about moving to gmail altogether. I already use it for business. However I can see that my business started developing some alarming signs of addiction to Google services …

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