Maddenation
Password smashword
OK, I added a new category. So sue me.
Don’t get me wrong. I love electronic gadgets that allow us to do so much today that we could only dream about when I was a young’un. However, I do get a little hyperventilated when the bells and whistles don’t go ringy dingy like they’re supposed to.
For example, recently I decided to take advantage of the capability through Amazon and Apple for transferring your Kindle books to your iPhone so you could, say, read a few paragraphs of your Kindle book while waiting in the doctor’s office. First, I downloaded the Kindle app for the iPhone. No problem. Came right in.
Then I tried to hook it up to mom’s Kindle and realized I didn’t know here account information at Amazon. No problem, I thought, I’ll merely log on the Amazon and figure out what I need to know.
So on I go into mom’s account and after rummaging around for a while on the Amazon website, I can’t find any indication that mom has a Kindle. Maybe I put it on my account? Nope! No Kindle anywhere, and no way to find out where it is. I try registering the Kindle and get a message, not surprisingly, that it’s registered to someone else.
Then it occurs to me (well maybe a few days later) that maybe I registered the Kindle to mom’s previous email account with Verizon. (Amazon has this peculiar practice of using your email ID as your account ID.) Sure enough, I find that mom has another Amazon account under the Verizon email (same password) and this account owns the Kindle. Because the Verizon email doesn’t exist anymore (I know, shouldn’t use these provider accounts), I decided to change the account over to the new email, which also requires a password change. Everything should be hunky dory.
Au contraire, mon fraire. The moment I logged off and tried to log on again, the new ID/password did not work! Not only that, but the mom’s previous ID didn’t work either. Nonplussed, I decided to try working the problem backwards through the Kindle. It involved “deregistering” the device and reregistering it in my name, which is quite reasonable since mom never uses it anyway. After doing that, I was able to log in to Amazon as myself and then us my ID to link up with the iPhone. Now, everything should be hunky dory.
Not quite. When I checked “my Kindle” from the website, it had none of the books already downloaded onto the Kindle when mom owned it. Apparently, you can’t transfer the content on the Kindle to a different email ID. I decide I’m going to have to use the phone and attempt to talk to someone at Amazon.
Amazon has an interesting way of having you contact them. You click on “contact us” on the help screen and ask them to call you. The phone rings and a computer voice puts you immediately on hold. Fortunately, the volume of callers wasn’t too high today, so I got my response (from India) pretty quickly. I explained the problem, but the first voice wasn’t able to get me the help I needed, so I was transferred to a second voice after another short wait. The second voice confirmed that I couldn’t transfer content to another ID, so I asked to transfer the Kindle back to the original email address, which I explained didn’t work anymore. The voice said the original email ID no longer existed in their system. I asked where the Kindle was assigned, and at first he didn’t know. Then, he said that apparently the books we had originally downloaded to the Kindle under mom’s previous ID were now attached to the Optonline email address. Of course the Kindle was no longer there because I had it! However, my attempt to change the ID had actually worked, and the contents of the Kindle was now available at mom’s new email.
Now, the Amazon voice explained, all I had to do was deregister the Kindle from my account and put it back on mom’s account. Then everything, alas, would be hunky dory. I did that. Then I changed the ID in the iPhone. Now, should I choose to, I can read my (well, mom’s) Kindle books from my iPhone. Viva la technologie.
Dad • Peeves • 01/06/10 • 0 comments
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