to want to stamp on Google until it's a bloody pulp beneath my hob-nailed boots?

[LordTrash]

I started an online course yesterday.

As part of the online course, I get sent youtubes to watch. It turned out youtube wouldn't let me watch them unless I signed in with a gmail account.

So I set up a second gmail account (I have another, but I like to keep separate email addresses for different aspects of my life) and let the course directors know.

I use Chrome as a browser, and tend to rely on it to remember my passwords (which it always has done until now). But as soon as I had 2 gmail accounts, it failed to autofill the passwords, which I promptly forgot, and couldn't recover, as when I checked the list, I could only see dots.

So I changed the passwords. Chrome asked me if I wanted it to remember them. I said yes.

This morning, I tried to sign into my course account, but the passwords weren't autofilled again, and as I had changed so many passwords (I got into a hideous password-changing loop that took 50 minutes and involved changing my microsoft mail passwords too) I couldn't remember which applied to which account, so I tried to change the password AGAIN.

Only to be told that my account was disabled.

I filled in a form to ask what I could do about that, but the form won't submit - just a buffering round-and-round thing next to the Submit button.

I looked online for ways to contact Google. There are none. All you can do is go on the gmail help forum - but you can only post on there AFTER SIGNING IN.

I CAN'T SIGN IN. WTF AM I SUPPOSED TO DO? There is no one to talk to, as apparently Google don't do customer service.

Sorry if you're losing the will to live reading this (thank you and well done), but I'm losing the will to live in this society right now.

(Just looked at the form again and the little buffering circle is still going round...and round...and round...twenty minutes later.)

It's the sheer irritation of having no recourse to anything or anyone if I want my disabled account back that's grinding my gears.

As I say: the problem with relying on "free" is that you have no recourse. You're not a customer. You have no contractual relationship, nor any service level agreement. Google give good, direct support to their customers, and your institution could if they wished pay Google (or Microsoft, or others) to provide you an email account with an SLA, support and shit. Or you could pay Google, Microsoft, Fastmail, others a trivial amount of money and get a service with people at the end of the phone. But you're getting the service level (zero) you can reasonably expect for what you're paying (zero). Doing things that are important to you on free services is a risk you take: the price is right, but is the service?