An Experience of Corporate Malaise During This Pandemic

This image of the first version of the "Official Greeting" oil painting (1992) by Mark Kostabi is from the book Kostabi One Hundred+ (1992).

 

Today is the 24 year anniversary of the publication of the nonfiction case study book Testament; however, the website for the noncommercial Internet edition of this book is currently unreachable to readers.  The website was first established that same year of 1997.  On December 2nd, I unsuccessfully attempted to publish the website via the new web hosting platform and since then have been continuously in contact with customer service representatives of the contracted well-known company, a subsidiary of a larger company, which is a subsidiary of still another company.  If corporate mentalities rule websites among all forms of social media, it seems I've become some form of casualty and hopefully it is merely temporary.  I don't recall ever having experienced any type of technical disruption that has been this difficult to resolve. 

 

Ironically, yesterday there was a Twitter, Inc. announcement about the outgoing yet current American President: "After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them — specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter — we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence . . . we made it clear going back years that these accounts are not above our rules entirely and cannot use Twitter to incite violence, among other things.  We will continue to be transparent around our policies and their enforcement."

 

What I personally found noteworthy about this announcement is that upon reading it I found that there was not a single human person named with the published announcement.  A corporation title was being utilized in a way to be potentially perceived as being representative of actual human beings when in actuality each person on Earth has individual social orientations with those of no two people being exactly alike.

 

In my case, I was eventually told by a customer service representative that the website builder sold to me is nonfunctional with my domain pointing to it.  This sequence of events had begun on Oct. 20 when due to the continuing lack of response when trying to communicate with my webmaster, I purchased a new website hosting package for the testament.org website.  This was something he had always handled previously. 

 

On Dec. 21, a customer service supervisor offered a solution to the nonfunctionality dilemma by suggesting that I use a different hosting package.  I agreed to personally transfer the files to the new platform as this seemed to at least afford a definitive solution to the useless first package.  Two weeks later upon attempting to publish the website, nonfunctionality again became the issue with this new package.  The customer service reps didn't have any positive result either when they tried to publish the website for me.  They've always indicated there should be a quick solution to the 'glitch' yet the correct reason for the problem remains to be determined.  

 

On Jan. 5, I received an Email from a technician advising that the problem was "your website has no assigned name" so I made another bewildered call to customer service and was told that the latest Email I'd received was a mistake and that the technical support staff was still working on the issue preventing my website from being published.

 

On Jan. 6,  upon contacting the company for the umpteenth time I again described the situation and was told by customer service representative Sandra that she needed (as usual) to escalate it to the technical division so the problem could be solved within a few hours.  She seemed earnestly sympathetic, as do most of the representatives.  I then checked the status of the previous ticket number assigned my website problem and was told the ticket was inactive as the technician had evidently misunderstood the difficulty.  Sandra opened a new ticket.  I inquired about the supervisor with whom I'd previously spoken to see if he might be available; however, Sandra said she was in a different state and added, "We all work from home."  Everything being in order at my website except for the 'nonfunctionality' upon trying to publish has been repeatedly confirmed by the customer service representatives.

 

On Jan. 7th, I received an Email from 'Marketing Specialist' Earl stating:

 

We carefully investigated your issue, and the issue is caused by the size of files in the project.  The maximum file size for a project is limited to 10MB, but currently, the project contains files that exceed this limit.

 

Therefore, to resolve the issue, you would need to reduce the size of files.  It can be done, for example, by using free stock images or reducing the size of the images used.

 

I don't know if my current files in totality exceeded 10MB so my morning project on the 8th was frantically checking all the photos and reducing the KBs of the larger ones at reduceimages.com.  Then I pushed the "publish" button yet the fault persisted.  There was a familiar message:

 

ALREADY EXISTS

 

Website or files already exists on your hosting server . . . [etc.]

 

On Thursday customer service rep 'Bobby B' mentioned that both he and his supervisor were sorry that I was continuing to have problems.  He tried reinstalling everything and found that the website still couldn't be published.  A little more than an hour later, I received an Email from 'Technical Support' Earl stating "Your ticket needs to be escalated to another department to resolve your issue.  I have sent the issue to the correct department for resolution and you will be notified of the status within 24 to 48 hours . . ." 

 

I checked again on Friday and was told by customer service rep. Justine that my difficulty had been assigned the highest priority and that an engineer in the 'Technology Escalation' department still had 24 more hours to resolve the problem. 

 

This whole experience dealing with website hosting services and dealing with people working in the social hierarchy of a corporate principality has me thinking once more about the influences of this form of interaction upon the lives of employees as well as the public.  Readers who've read Testament may recall that aspects of human identity and the nature of interpersonal relationships influenced by corporate social dynamics became a subject for metaphysical and spiritual contemplation in the concluding chapters.  These aspects of life continue to have an impact upon everyone's lives here on Earth.  The effects are difficult to articulate with words in a general way so it has been illuminating for me to consider perspectives offered by transcendental communicators in some of the specific case chronologies profiled at the Metaphysical Articles blog.  There is available for blog readers a "Channeling Cases - Articles and Videos Links Index". 

 

This blogger is also planning further commentary about Pop culture as entertainment is obviously a predominant focus for people worldwide — often through corporate entertainment franchises.  

 

Creative endeavors are among the various aspects of historical documentation that each present a particular perspective while preserving some form of record chronicling how human life on Earth has evolved.  Each viewpoint may be considered in relation to individual mentalities of people and their state of spiritual and metaphysical awareness.  

 

Usually I can focus my thoughts elsewhere and not dwell on some specific problem yet right now with this 'technical difficulty' it's hard for me to think about new articles and I also still have to finish italicizing words on files that I had to 'cut and paste' to the new platforms.  I think perhaps what I'm feeling is sadness.  Obviously, nobody with whom I've dealt in this 'corporation' considers it his or her responsibility of making certain that a customer's problem is resolved. 

 

1-11-21 Update: Today upon calling I expressed my frustration and asked if there are any alternatives that remain for me now to publish my website after 40 days have elapsed since this situation began.  The customer service rep couldn’t offer any and mentioned that both of the nonfunctioning website packages provided to me are among those of an entire "pod" of customers whose websites remain offline due to a coding problem.