A VIRUS spoofing my return email address has apparently been emailing many people. I know this because some of these viral email messages bounce back to my Gmail account as undeliverable. Mistaking these reports for actual messages sent by me, Gmail has decided I’m too active a user, and forbidden me to send any more mail today.
I’m a Google Apps user with a multi-gigabyte Gmail account and I’ve sent less than a dozen actual messages today because I am home sick with a cold. But Gmail doesn’t know that. And Gmail doesn’t care. Because Gmail isn’t real, not even in the David Sleight sense. It’s a set of equations programmed by fallible human beings, and it controls my life and yours.
There is no one to talk to at Google about my service problem because there is no there there. The services I pay for are delivered by robot magic in the cloud. When something goes wrong, it just goes wrong. There’s nobody to track down the virus’s origin and make it stop. There’s nobody to say, “This user hasn’t actually sent these messages.” (I keep marking the returned mails as “spam,” but Google hasn’t caught on, probably because customer service problems aren’t supposed to be reported by inference.)
My friend wears a shirt that says “The Cloud Is A Lie,” but that isn’t quite the truth. More like, the cloud is a customer service problem. One I just found myself on the wrong end of.
Google to customer: Go fuck yourself. In the cloud.
