Because spring is not busy enough on a farm, life now finds us crossing off our old email address on 10,000 postcards,  applying new email info to printed pamphlets and scrambling to change every online interface we have from our old email address to our new one.

Before I go further,  PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE change our email in your computer address book from the OLD soon to be GONE FOREVER email of green.hope.farm@valley.net to our NEW email address of

allofus@greenhopeessences.com

YES! There are 2 e’s on a row in there.

Did you change it?

Whew!  Now that you have done that, I can continue my tale of technology woe.

Wait? Did you REALLY change it?

Because you REALLY need to! No joke!

Last week, Jim read in our local paper The Valley Snooze News that all valley.net addresses were going to be discontinued by a new company that just bought the server. He reported we had just days to jump ship, because people sending emails to all valley.net addresses were not even going to get a bounce back to tell them that the email didn’t exist anymore.  Some guy named Chip who had abandoned his valley.net address “years ago” to embrace gmail  was quoted as saying, “That’s progress.”

THANKS FOR THE UPDATE Chip.

And with that pronouncement,  6,000 valley.net addresses were history.

It was rude strange that we read about the end of our email address in the paper. It seemed rude bizarre there was  no notice from the company.  In fact, we still haven’t gotten ANY notice, rude or otherwise, from the company.

On hearing this news, I got that glazed look that most technology glitches give me. To my adult children, who were sitting at the kitchen table relaxed and scrolling through Instagram, FB, texts and the internet simultaneously, my face  probably looked like one painted by Edvard Munch pained.

Behind that face lay a brain spinning out of control already brain-storming solutions.  I was immediately busy plotting solutions for this nightmare conundrum. Too busy in fact to  fake technology serenity.

Green Hope Farm has had this email address for 25 years.  Everything we do loops through this email address. AND I MEAN EVERYTHING.  My list of things to sort out is several pages long. And growing.

Fortunately as I wrung my hands, Sarah and Will said, “NO PROBLEM!”  Mercifully for them they did not say, “That’s progress.” Instead they said, “This happens every day.  We can fix everything.” and they ARE fixing everything except my attitude.

Today for example, Sarah and Jen are getting the kinks out of the new email system.

allofus@greenhopeessences.com

But you know that, right? Because you changed it in your computer address book! Right?

Not to beat a dead horse but We REALLY need you to change us in your computer, because valley.net is kaput. This new company could give a hoot that valley.net, as an offshoot of Dartmouth’s blitz mail, was one of the first email communities ever.  They could give a hoot about the 6,000 people like me are who are trying to wrap their spinning heads around life after valley.net.

I hope everyone has a team like I do tuning our their worried mother holding my hand and telling me to CHILL. But I doubt it.

Valley.net stopped giving out valley.net addresses 20 years ago, so that means the 6,000 of us dinosaurs customers, unlike Mr. That’s Progress Chip, have been clinging to our valley.net addresses and resisting change for at least 20 years and/or haven’t had an assertive lively group of young people around them dragging them into the future encouraging change as I have or as Chip clearly had.

TRUE CONFESSION- My son, webmaster Ben, suggested I make a change in email address years ago.  He was joined by a Greek chorus of other siblings.  But I insisted I liked the bucolic sound of our obsolete email address.  I regret my foot dragging.  There, I said it. 

So back to the main point of this post- The old email will not work in a matter of days despite my Herculean efforts to stop the flow of time– and if you send an email to that address,  IT WON’T BOUNCE BACK and tell you we didn’t get your mail  either.

My great grandfather was an GP in Philadelphia and when he didn’t hear from a patient for awhile, he would tell other patients that the person was  dead, even when he or she was very much alive and kicking. IF YOU DO NOT HEAR FROM US in response to emailing the old email address, WE ARE NOT DEAD! As Chip would say, It’s progress.

PS Is it ironic that technology can create problems only a human can fix, one cross off at a time?