When the ironic isn't so funny, or, you do it to yourself

I've had Causing Accidents for a year now, born from the demise of my Special-ness domain name. This poor puppy has been busted for a week now, and my lifeline feels cut. As pathetic as it may sound to many, this blog is one of my favorite hobbies (and I have few hobbies). Without it, I sit around wondering what to do. I haven't been able to write film reviews or weekend updates. It's a dark world I live in.

What makes it worse is that this blog is also the cause of an identity theft crime against me last week. That week was going bad enough due to some irritating work drama that I had been trying to ignore for a month blow up in my face. I got a phone call during a meeting about the drama, and it was my bank. They said I was going to overdraw my checking account. Impossible! I had just paid my bills, filed them on Causing DEBTcidents and knew I had more than enough to last me until my next check. So I asked them what was going on, and they listed some charges that I definitely did not make.

"One thousand dollars to Google AdWords...9 dollars to Yahoo Wallet...1 dollar to Yahoo Wallet...One thousand again to Google AdWords..."

"Yeah, I definitely have no idea what those are. Now what?"

"Well we have to let these all bounce, then file a fraud claim. It will take a week to fix, and you are going to need to close your checking account to be safe."

Great...so all those bills I paid two days before that were about to go through bounced because some weasel stole my debit card number. ID Theft happens all the time, and I've gone through the process before back when Jake and I got robbed. I was understandably upset, as this totally messes with my attempts to get my budget back on track and will lead to hours of unnecessary work on my part. But what made me the most upset was...

...when I realized that it was sort of my fault. For a few days I was wondering how on earth I got my debit card number stolen. I don't shop online, I don't buy from sites I don't trust, I didn't use my card in Alabama on vacation. How the hell did someone get my number? My card was only 6 weeks old!

Then I got an unsettling suspicion in the back of my head, that was confirmed by a fellow internet-addict. Register Fly, my domain name provider, fucked me. Causing Accidents, quite literally, caused me accidents. If you read the article, you will learn that Register Fly lost their ICANN-accredited status, and has basically gone under leaving about a million customers out cold. No access to their domain names, no simple way to get them back, and worse absolutely NO notice to customers that this was coming. You go to their page, and there is NO SIGN that this was going to occur. Infuriating.

The week before my vacation I went to renew my domain, as it was set to expire March 17th. Only now do I remember that it was a goofy renewal. It took me several tries to get the transaction to be successful. I got lots of "terminal time outs" and I had no idea what was going on. Finally it went through, but I never got sent to a confirmation page. No worries though, or at least I thought, I got an email that says I renewed and it cleared my bank account. So I forgot about it, and rested happy in the knowledge that I'd be with my domain for another year.

I go on vacation with my best friends and have the most relaxing week of my life. I return home, go to my blog, all is well. That was March 17th, the day it was set to expire. I awake March 18th, and my blog is dead. Hmmmm, I thought, wonder if Register Fly messed up. I log in to Register Fly and the expiration date is still 2007, so I email their help support. I get no response. For days. I call, and get a busy signal every time. Then the phishing hit, and now the rest is history.

I realize now I did several things a librarian should Never do. I assumed that my transaction went through appropriately, I did not follow up on the expiration date update, and I didn't do any research into the company.

However, why would I have researched the company? I bought with them last year just fine, and had a year of fine and normal service. Why would I think anything would be different? There were no notices on the site to make me think otherwise.

So in a way I take the blame on the phishing - but at the same time I'm fully aware it is Register Fly's fault. I'm not sure what, if anything, to do. I'm one of just one million who are having troubles with them, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who got their card info phished. And to be honest, I can't 100 percent prove it is a result of the domain name despite how logical and obvious the answer seems.

Now I'm with Go Daddy for my domain name, and feel good about that. I even have it renewed for two years - they gave me one year free at sign-up. This page will load within the next day or two, and my life will begin to resume as normal. There's really no point in sitting around feeling sorry for yourself, right? Get upset, get pissed, get over it and fix it. If anything, I learned that I have definitely grown in the past year. If this had happened to me in San Francisco I'm sure I would have gone into some insanely deep funk. Instead, I shed some tears mostly at how irritating it will be to fix this, and went on with life.

I'm hoping that this is the end of the shit storm for me for awhile. I'll never understand why goods and bads come in waves.