Cable Convolution

I’ve mentioned we’re about to move out of our current home, but our new home isn’t completed yet (will be probably December). We’ll be living with Cowgrit’s mother during the interim months.

One complication we hadn’t considered until a few days ago was: Can we keep our land-line telephone number and our Road Runner email addresses? Usually, when moving, you have the service turned off at one address and turned on at the next. But we don’t have a next address, yet. (Well, actually, we know what our next home address will be, it just doesn’t exist, yet.)

Setting up the phone transfer turns out to be simple. They can just put the phone service on hold for a few months until the new house is ready for it.

But the email service is more difficult. Not only do we want to keep our email addresses after we move, we need to be able to use our email in the interim. I called and talked with the cable company and I was surprised to find out they apparently have never had this situation come up before. Really? Out of the millions of customers they have, no one has had this scenario?

Since Cowgrit’s mom already has Road Runner service at her house, we can’t just transfer our service to her home. And if we cancel the service with RR, we loose the email addresses. (Our email addresses are our names, and as we were among the first in our area to sign on to RR, we didn’t have to take something like [our name]729.rr.com.)

I spent over 40 minutes on the phone with RR getting this figured out. Unfortunately, the customer service people had no idea how or if this could work. But fortunately, they transferred me to tech service, and the guy there was very helpful (though he didn’t know at first if this could work, either). Sean — thank you very much — checked into the options and figured out how to finagle a way to satisfy our need.

What we’ll do is transfer our email addresses to Cowgrit’s mom’s RR account. Then when we move into our new home, we’ll transfer our email out of her account and into our new account. This way we keep our email addresses and can continue to use the addresses while our own service is cancelled.

This site is not part of my RR account, so there should be no interruption at all to my posting here. Well, there should be no technical interruption to my posting. I’m still not sure how I’ll be working things while living with my mother-in-law. I won’t have a dedicated office, so sitting down to write something will be a little more complicated than how I currently can do it.

Bullgrit