{"id":3816,"date":"2015-04-18T17:39:33","date_gmt":"2015-04-19T00:39:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.coolkarma.com\/dharma\/?p=3816"},"modified":"2015-04-18T17:40:12","modified_gmt":"2015-04-19T00:40:12","slug":"i-am-not-nancy-parker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/?p=3816","title":{"rendered":"I AM (not nancy parker)"},"content":{"rendered":"

When my illness became too great and I had to leave my career behind, I also left behind my business name … NancyParker.\u00a0 Make no mistake, that is not a typo.\u00a0 NancyParker was a one word brand name.\u00a0 “Hello, this is NancyParker, Director of Information Technology how may I help you.”\u00a0 As an early adopter of technology — which was of course my business — I snatched up the name NancyParker quickly and took much pride in securing it on places like Facebook or Skype.\u00a0 Don’t bother looking me up on either of those social media illusions … my Facebook account is deactivated and Skype has just informed me today that I may not have my original Skype account back because I failed the account verification form too many times.<\/p>\n

I’ve gone by Karma for so many years now that it seems odd I would even bother jumping through hoops to prove I was Nancy Parker .. which is still my legal name, just not my preferred moniker.\u00a0 I don’t even use Skype anymore.\u00a0 But one day … I saw my “old” Skype profile picture and the name NancyParker and I thought, gee I wonder if I still have the password to that account.\u00a0 Which I apparently do not.\u00a0 Turns out, since I no longer use my original work domain email address I can’t simply ask Skype to SEND a password reset to that account.\u00a0 No, instead you need to go to the Skype account verification form … which I now believe to be a cosmic recursive black hole.<\/p>\n

I haven’t used the account since I left work back in 2007.\u00a0 And since I signed up for Skype when it first launched back in the dark ages you can imagine that I might miss<\/i> some of the security questions.\u00a0 Dang, I suspect any of the contacts<\/i> on my Skype list that it wants me to name — as if this was the McCarthy era<\/a>\u00a0 and I am now being told to name names– have long since deleted me.\u00a0 So I would fill out the form to the best of my ability … and wait for a response from Skype with my new password.\u00a0 But they never did get back to me.\u00a0 Instead I would send a reply<\/i> to the ticket and ask the status and they would send their auto-bot reply back asking me to fill out the form again.\u00a0 I did this a half dozen times before launching a one hour text chat with a Skype representative .. who assured me that he would personally follow through with my account verification form if I would kindly just complete the form one more time for him.<\/p>\n

I so wish it was one of the traditional security forms where they ask you who your high school mascot was, or the name of your mother’s maid. I really like the ones you do on live chat with credit card companies when they start listing a bunch of old address where you lived and you have to tell them which one is NOT true.\u00a0 I remember being asked once what my street name was … for the life of me I thought they were asking what was my gang name so I told them I was always just Nancy Parker.<\/p>\n

\"VFailed\"<\/a>No the case for Skype … they have a list of questions about me<\/i> that I am appartently not privvy to.\u00a0 Because today\u00a0 I received another note from Skype saying that I have failed the account verification form too many times and they are unwilling to believe I am Nancy Parker and I will not be able to have my account under any circumstances.\u00a0 They suggest I make a new account.<\/p>\n

I’d like to say that I tossed my hair over my shoulders and laughed at the insanity of it all.\u00a0 But I didn’t.\u00a0 I cried.\u00a0 The frustration, the idiocy, the incompetence .. all worthy of course of some tears of annoyance.\u00a0\u00a0 But in truth … I realized during this long and drawn out catch 22 … that I had remembered that my mother was one of my original Skype contacts … on that original Skype account.\u00a0 And given that Mom has been missing from my life for more than seven years … the pain of her estrangement just got a bit too real.<\/p>\n

I may or may not go any further with the Skype attestation.\u00a0 Sure its a matter of principal and I hate when a technology snafu wins.\u00a0 But regardless of me being able to recover that account or not … it will not bring my mother back, nor will it help me understand her reasons for leaving.<\/p>\n

To paraphrase Shakespeare out of context … O! be some other name:\u00a0\u00a0 <\/i>What\u2019s in a name?\u00a0\u00a0 <\/i>I am in fact many things by many names …Bitch, Lady, Babe, Mommy or actually most often “That’s my Mom!”\u00a0 whilst eyes rolling in the back of their head.\u00a0 I am blessed to have all of my children in my life, an amazing father who is an unwavering rock of support and the love of a man who has only ever known me as Karma.\u00a0 He knows my pain, accepts my crazy and helps me to laugh and live my life beyond any bump in the road.\u00a0 I don’t need to prove myself to any of my friends and family.\u00a0 To them .. being me is more than enough for which I am grateful beyond words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When my illness became too great and I had to leave my career behind, I<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[58,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3816","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-customer-service","category-dharma"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3816"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3819,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3816\/revisions\/3819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3816"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3816"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.karmabytes.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3816"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}