The Eclectic Interweb

As lots of you know, I have two more kids in the UK, a daughter and a son. While I often refer to my daughters here in Australia as ‘eldest’ or youngest, both of my kids in the UK are a lot older than them. Of course distance is a killer when you want to maintain relationships and the time difference doesn’t help, yet I manage to keep up with my daughters doings. In fact she has plans to come and visit us here for Xmas if she can organise herself and her kids.

My son on the other hand rarely talks to me at all. As a matter of fact we’ not talked about anything sensible for 6 months or more. We had the occasional ‘hello’ and ‘are you there’s etc… but nothing else. That is until a few days ago when he contacted me to let me know the mailbox he was using on one of my sites was no longer functioning.

The reason for this was mostly that having asked him to move all his archive material back *last year* because I was changing hosts, and having had him confirm he would move it all back in *November*, I did eventually move hosts and all the sites shifted to a new reseller account (as documented a week or two ago). I asked the techs at the support dept to move the databases for me to make sure it was all done properly so under normal circumstances all trace of the old sites would have been deleted!

So… to begin with, as far as I knew all his mail had already been moved by him to the new Gmail account I’d helped him set up. Of course he’d not actually done it so as far as I knew all his archive material had been lost.

However, the guys at AussieHQ take a belt and braces outlook and waited until they had a 100% all clear from me before actually deleting the site from the old server. I was able to contact them and after some issues had been sorted out… the mailbox was moved intact.

Then we discovered the people he is contracting with don’t allow web access thru the port that Cpanel uses for its webmail. I found him some software that he can use as an ‘end-user’ but he doesn’t seem interested in it so the upshot is that after all the effort he won’t be using the mailbox much longer anyway!

So what’s the point of all this? Basically to point out that during this entire episode he didn’t *once* ask how I was, how the rest of the family was, what we’d been doing, whether I was suffering from some incurable disease etc… nothing about how *he* is, or his wife, or his new address and telephone number (he’s moved house) absolutely nothing ‘personal’ whatsoever. Just getting me to sort out a problem that he could have easily avoided to begin with.

Am I miffed? Well yes – I wouldn’t have thought it would be *that* hard to at least fake *some* sort of social ‘pleasantries’.