Googling Google for a right old boondoggle
So here’s how I found, after a fashion, God. When a friend didn’t reply to an email I rang to see if he was dead. He wasn’t. He hadn’t replied because he hadn’t got the email.
I sent it again. Again he didn’t get it. We agreed it was odd. But later that day the phone rang. ‘‘I found your emails, Joe,’’ he said. ‘‘You won’t like this. They were in spam.’’
So his machine had scanned my jewelled prose and judged it to be the work of some Nigerian heiress, or Indian pill scamster, or send-me-your-bankdetails phisherperson.
I took the news calmly. ‘‘Destroy your machine,’’ I said. But even as I spoke I heard a whisper. That whisper said that there were others of late who’d not replied to emails. I rang one. I rang another. No, they both said, they’d had no emails from me.
‘‘Look,’’ I said, and my gorge rose with the words as if I’d tasted something off, ‘‘among your spam.’’
‘‘Aha,’’ they both exclaimed, and there was a tone in that aha which I did not appreciate, ‘‘there you are. Well who’d have thought it?’’
‘‘Indeed,’’ I said and rang off. Something was clearly up and it didn’t take me long to find out what. All three correspondents were on gmail. Gmail had lobbed me on to the cyber trash heap, had excluded me from its virtual world. And gmail, I soon discovered, belonged to Google.
The enemy was in plain view.
I rang the company that sells me access to the internet and explained.
The technical expert sucked his thumb for a bit then said the problem was my email address.
‘‘Think again,’’ I said, ‘‘I’ve had this email address for 25 years,’’ which is roughly twice as long, I managed not to add, as you’ve been drawing breath.
‘‘Exactly,’’ he said. ‘‘It’s a legacy email.’’
Well now, in the early 1990s I signed up with a local internet company called Caverock. Soon Caverock was swallowed by a bigger company, which in turn was swallowed by a bigger one and then by the one I was now talking to. But all along I’ve kept the Caverock address. And now Google, which did not exist when it was minted, has declared it junk.
‘‘It’s their algorithm,’’ said the technical infant, ‘‘there’s nothing I can do.’’
‘‘That’s just where you’re wrong,’’ I said. ‘‘You can get on to Google right now and tell them that their loathsome algorithm is blocking a legitimate email address that you yourselves administer. I’d do it myself but you know their filthy language.’’
‘‘I’ll put you on hold, sir,’’ said the child, ‘‘while I talk to someone who remembers the twentieth century.’’ But the old person, it turned out, had no answers. Had I considered acquiring a new email address?
Down went the phone with a slam that woke the dog. Would I change my email address just to appease Google? Would I hell. Deep in my groin something stirred. I would disregard the odds and fight. It was me against Google, me against the Leviathan. I’d ring Google and berate them. I’d halloo their name to the reverberate hills. I’d write columns that would make that name a hissing and a byword till they conceded out of shame. I’d harry and pester, and never surrender. And as the first step in my campaign, I googled, with trembling fingers, Google.
Have you ever seen a dog trying to bite a soccer ball? The ball squirts constantly ahead of it. Though the dog clamps its jaws it can get no purchase. Well, it’s just the same with Google.
Google Google and it offers nothing to bite, nothing to grasp and twist. No phone number, no email address. Press ‘contact us’ and off you go to a help forum which is neither a forum nor helpful.
There are lists of frequently asked questions, few of which I understood and none of which I wanted to ask. I tried typing my own questions. ‘What are you afraid of?’ I typed. ‘Invalid question’ came the reply.
I went round and round the internet but Google, which effectively runs it, evaded me. Had there ever been, I wondered, an enemy like Google? Something vast but invisible. Something that was everywhere but nowhere. Something that we could address only through intermediaries. Something we’d never seen or met but that saw everything we did and that knew everything about us? And it was then that a line from Hopkins came to mind, Gerard Manley Hopkins the priest and poet, tormented by sex and doubt and doomed to die young. And who lay on his bed of misery one night, and realised he was ‘wrestling with (my God!) my God’.
Would I change my email address just to appease Google? Would I hell.