'Cos It Feels Empty.. Without Me

Well I'm back nananananananananana
Eminem- Without Me

Hello ScoFans!

Did you miss me? I've missed all of you. I've missed you so much I'm sitting here at 7 in the morning to let you all know I'm back.. back again.

Some of you know this already but for those of you who haven't heard, I've been battling with Google for the last week.

They locked me out of my email account, out of my blog, out of my reader, out of... no wait, it was just those three.

So, I had to email Google and basically ask the question that had to be asked... "WTF?"

Dear Google,

I tried to sign into my account this morning only to learn that my account has been disabled. Apparently I've violated some "Terms of Service"

I'm not sure what I did, but when Facebook told me I violated their terms of service it's because I made fun of Andrew G. Is this your issue also? I didn't realise he was so powerful.

Not only has my email access been disabled, but my blog has been disabled as well, which I'm sure is causing distress among my many followers. I have dozens of followers. Baker's dozens (They come in thirteens)

So far I have had one of my followers write to me on Twitter and tell me how upset they are. I hope you'll pay for any counselling they require. I don't want to announce publicly what has happened for fear it might cause stress among my other readers.

And Google, I like you. I mean, obviously gmail isn't as cool as Hotmail and your search engine isn't as awesome as Bing, but your blogger website is far better than Microsoft's "spaces". Have you seen it? It's very lame.

Plus Microsoft want to charge me to download a new team into my Blood Bowl game on my Xbox, where if I'd bought the game on PC I wouldn't be charged for that team. I think I will still pay for the download though, because the team is the "Dark Elves". Usually I play as the "Wood Elves", but I find people make fun of "Wood Elves" for being weak ass tree huggers. Nobody messes with Dark Elves though. I hope they have magic powers. Then I will definetely download them.

Wait.. is that how I violated your terms of service? When I posted on that one blog about the Microsoft Songsmith ad? In my defense, that ad is pretty poor, and it deserves to be made fun of.

Anyway, if you could please let me know exactly what term I have violated I would be thankful so I will not violate it again in the future. Not like Microsoft violated me as a consumer by trying to make me pay for the Dark Elves.

I hope we can resolve the matter shortly,

ScoMan

That was last Friday morning (exactly one week ago).

When it came to Sunday and I still hadn't heard from them, I had to email them again, and I was furious, as I'm sure you'll tell by this next email..

Dear Google,

It has been two days since I last contacted you about my disabled account, and I am starting to worry you are using this time to build up a super strong team of Orcs to beat my measly Dark Elves in Blood Bowl, rather than working on a solution to our problem.

People are now becoming frustrated that they cannot access my blog. I have now received up to four Tweets crying out at the injustice of my blog being deactivated, not to mention my email account and access to my Google Reader, which remembers all of their blog addresses so that I don't have to.

I want to know three things.

1/ Why was my account deactivated?

2/ Will my account being reactivated any time in the future?

3/ When is the series Four of Dexter being released in region four?

I hope that we can resolve this matter promptly.

Thinking of you always,

ScoMan

A few more days have rolled by since then and I hadn't heard anything, so this morning when I saw there was one new email in my spam folder I didn't dare hope it was finally a response from Google. I'd been disappointed before. So when it was a response from Google you can imagine how excited I was (I believe my exact words were "BBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBBOOOOOOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM. I'm back baby!")

So what did Google have to say for themselves? What was it that has kept me locked off the bloggosphere for over a week now?

Hello,

Thank you for your report. We apologize for any inconvenience you may have
experienced. The issue you described should now be resolved.

If you're still having trouble accessing your Gmail account, you can reset your
password on the following page, as long as you still have access to the email
address you listed while creating your Gmail account:
https://www.google.com/accounts/ForgotPasswd.

If you aren't receiving the password-assistance email after visiting the above page,
please check your inbox and spam/junk mail for an email from account-recovery-
noreply@google.com.

Finally, we've compiled a survey to better understand suspicious activity associated
with Gmail accounts, and we'd appreciate if you'd take a few minutes to answer the
questions. We are constantly working on ways to safeguard our systems, and the
information you provide will help us continue to protect our users' information:
http://mail.google.com/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=improve_detection.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

"Suspicious activity?"... I'm not sure, but I think Google just accused me of being a terrorist. Or maybe they think I'm suspiciously awesome.

And yeah, that survey sounds like a good idea. Tell you what, it took you a week to get my blog reactivated and I've got a lot of blogs to catch up one due to being locked out of my account, so I don't know Google, maybe I'll get to it one day. Plus you didn't even mention Dexter.

Anyway, I better keep getting ready for work, I just wanted to let you all know the crisis is over, I am back and I will be catching up with your blogs over the weekend (160 something in my reader.. It's going to be a blog filled weekend!)

Thinking of you always,

ScoMan