email – Cindy Hval

I’m a fiercely loyal person.

I’ve cheered for the Seattle Seahawks since Chuck Knox came on board as head coach.

I’ve been married to the same man for 40 years. I’ve shopped at the same grocery store for the same amount of time, even after they moved an inconvenient distance from my home.

Speaking of, I’ve lived in the same house for 33 years.

The same stylist has done my hair in the same style for about 15 years. It’s probably time for a new ’do, but not a new stylist.

A friend gently pointed out that fierce loyalty might be another way of saying I’m change-averse.

Fair point, especially in light of recent circumstances that foisted change upon me.

Approximately 27 years ago, we got our first home computer – a big, bulky Gateway. So long ago that my first email address was AOL and we had a dial-up connection. At the time, I was pregnant with our fourth kid and only used email to stay in touch with out-of-town family and friends. Remember the days before social media memes when we would send each other funny jokes/stories?

My husband decided we needed a family email address. He discovered a free version of Juno and created an account: D for Derek, C for Cindy, and our last name. That’s what I’ve used ever since, even though Derek changed his personal email long ago.

By that time, I’d launched my freelance writing career and all of my work contacts were tied to Juno, so I persevered and paid to upgrade to a professional account.

Fast forward to a year ago, when that account was repeatedly hacked. If you received a note supposedly from me with the subject line Cindy Hval invites you … I’m sorry.

I spent the past year changing my passwords every few weeks. At my age, I’ve only got so many passwords left in me!

Equally annoying, the Juno spam filter never worked, so I was constantly flooded with bogus links to recipe sites and political junk.

When my account got hacked again last month, a few days before we left for vacation, I’d finally had enough.

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” may be my motto, but Juno email was well and truly broken.

Since I already had a Gmail account (cindyhval@gmail.com), I opted to make the switch.

That’s when I discovered changing your email address is almost as labor-intensive as changing your physical address.

I started with a bang by sending this note to everyone in my contact list: “I’m ending my relationship with Juno. It turns out breaking up isn’t hard to do.”

Except, unfortunately, it is because I forgot the “l” in Gmail when I sent the first batch.

Then I realized everything from my bank account to my healthcare providers to my library card was tied to that email. Even worse, businesses make it very difficult to update your email address. I’ve ended up unsubscribing from a lot of stuff and hoping I can figure out how to resubscribe later.

Navigating a new email program is like learning to speak Italian or French. All of my tidy, easily accessible folders have to be replicated in an unfamiliar layout. And sooner or later I’m going to have to sync it with Microsoft Outlook.

I am not good at syncing.

On the bright side, I haven’t had to create a new password in several weeks!

For now, if you need me, I’ll be crossing off my old email address and inking my new one onto approximately 300 business cards because I’m too cheap to order new ones.

Au revoir, Juno. Vive le changement!

I don’t like change.

I like reliable routines, familiar faces, and grocery stores that don’t rearrange their aisles every few months.

I’ve kept the same husband for 36 years, still live in the house we bought in 1993, and use a paper planner and a wall calendar with cute kitten photos to track my days.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Then my email broke, and I couldn’t fix it.

It was a catastrophic computer event that I couldn’t blame on my kids, since I’m the only user of the device.

I’ve used the same email program since before my youngest son was born. My current email address is only my second. (My first was an AOL account. Yes, that’s how old I am.)

If I just used email as an old-fashioned way to stay in touch with folks, it wouldn’t be a big deal. But I use it to track every single story and project on my to-do list.

My newspaper articles are assigned and filed via email, and I schedule interviews and bill clients through it. Without it, I might as well be banging away on a Smith Corona, stuffing envelopes and looking for stamps.

Tech support (my husband) resuscitated the program a couple of times. I’d start the day bright with hope, only to have it fail repeatedly. When you have more than a dozen people waiting for you to schedule their pandemic project story, you really don’t want to lose their names, addresses and the descriptions of their projects.

“The problem is you have way more email than Juno is designed for, and the company hasn’t updated their program in forever,” Derek said. “It’s just no longer sustainable.”

I gasped.

“You mean I can’t use dchval@juno anymore? What will happen to the hundreds of emails in my folders?”

Derek told me not to panic until he did some research. Meanwhile, I panicked anyway and frantically backed up several years of mail. OK, more than several. My earliest saved message is from 2009. But. I really need that note.

“I’ve got good news and bad news,” Derek announced the following day. “There’s a program I can buy that will allow me to save your Juno email, and you can still use that address.”

“That’s wonderful!” I said throwing my arms around him. “What’s the bad news?”

“You’re going to have to learn how to use Outlook,” he said.

Outlook is a personal information manager software system from Microsoft. Friends and professional contacts have urged me to use it for years, but I’ve never seen the need. My trusty paper planner and antiquated email provider served me well, until now.

Knowing my propensity to ask, “Is it fixed, yet?” repeatedly whenever he works on my computer, Derek wisely chose a time when I’d be away from my home office for the day.

When I returned, he was working in the backyard.

“Oh, no!” I said. “Is my problem unfixable?”

He grinned.

“Nope. I finished hours ago. Your email is up and running, and I don’t think you lost a thing.”

You see why I keep him? He’s an absolute hero. His heroics, however, only go so far.

“Sam can show you how to use Outlook,” he said.

Our future-college-professor son patiently showed me how to configure my address book, how to send and receive mail, and where to find my folders. That’s when we discovered one of the largest folders had duplicated contents, and another folder was a jumble of old and new contacts and projects, but most important, everything was there.

Obviously, I’ve been saving way too many emails, so now a couple of times a day I poke through a folder and delete items. Sometimes it turns into quite a stroll down memory lane, as I read encouraging notes from former editors and warm letters from readers. But I am resolute in my purging, even though Derek said I no longer have to worry about my email crashing.

I even learned a new trick. I can now categorize my emails and tasks with pretty, little colored flags. Though I’m still figuring out this new-to-me program, I already wonder why I ever balked at using it.

In fact, you could say my Outlook is getting brighter every day.

———

Cindy Hval can be reached at dchval@juno.com. Hval is the author of “War Bonds: Love Stories from the Greatest Generation” (Casemate Publishers, 2015) available locally at Auntie’s Bookstore, Barnes & Noble locations and on Amazon.