Dear Editor,

I am a senior citizen music teacher who relies heavily on my desktop Mac computer and iPhone for communication and sourcing of information.

My service provider is Cable & Wireless. I have a @cwjamaica.com e-mail address that I have been using for several years.

Since a week ago, I have been unable to retrieve or send e-mail from either one of my devices, and as I am totally without the technological skills to figure anything out, after several phone calls of complaint to C&W without results, finally on Thursday I travelled to and spent several hours at the C&W Half-Way-Tree main office to get assistance.

The result of this visit was the issuance of a new password for my e-mail account and the reassurance that everything would be sorted at home with this new password.

Needless to say, I was still unable to access my mail, even with the new password.

I sought some assistance from my daughter, who is minimally better than I am with all this technology. She called the toll free number and spent 45 minutes speaking to a technical support agent in El Salvador, who tried to “talk” her through the steps to reconfigure the settings on my server.

She was made to understand that because of the merger of Cable & Wireless with Flow, certain steps had to be taken to allow the transition to a new webmail platform in order for me to retrieve my mail.

She was further told that an e-mail had been sent to my inbox advising of these new important changes. I had received no such e-mail from C&W.

After a very long time on the phone with this tech support lady (who was quite patient and tried to be helpful), she talked us through changing the incoming and outgoing server settings. We were still unable to accomplish the task as she was not able to assist with changing my actual account-type setting from ‘Google Mail’.

She advised us to contact MacMail direct for assistance, as there was nothing further that she could do to help us.

An unexpected visit from a family friend proved to be my saving grace. An enthusiast of Mac computers and knowledgeable in the implications involving this conversion issue, she went online and printed instructions from the LIME website relative to my Mac computer and my iPhone, and solved everything within an hour or so. I was able to retrieve all my mail and keep my e-mail address on both my devices.

My questions to LIME/Flow are:

1) Are your paying customers not worthy of a much better service and dissemination of information, particularly those who are senior citizens and without the requisite skills to figure out all these technological challenges on their own?

2) This South American support call centre, staffed with persons speaking with heavily accented English (as helpful as they try to be), would it be asking too much to expect them to be knowledgeable on the same technology that is on your website?

Food for thought.

Besta J Burgher

Phadrian Avenue

Kingston 6

burgs27@cwjamaica.com