Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Googles new PIN requirement

Google, in their infinite wisdom has decided to make it necessary to enter a PIN number to verify my physical street address. EVEN AFTER THEY VERIFIED MY PHONE NUMBER. Supposedly Google sent me a PIN number via snail mail back on November 7th. I tried to do the diligent thing and entered a PIN number that was given to me by Google but appearantly for another of their services. There is a button to request a new PIN number however it won't work until you've exhausted all of your attempts to enter your PIN. Even then it isn't active because you get locked out! By the time you've exhausted your attempts to enter your PIN it's too late. Well, to make a long story short my attempts to enter a PIN number has me suspended from my account. I requested a replacement PIN number on Saturday and it arrived in the mail Monday. I was impressed at the speed in which I received it. Now the problem is that I cannot make it past the login screen because my account is suspended. I have sent 2 emails (one yesterday and one today) to try to get my account re-activated. I finally received a response today that Adsense is out of the office until Monday. Isn't this just lovely! I am left in limbo until then. I can now kiss goodbye an extremely lucritive offer that was made to me by an affiliate. I don't have access to my code so I can't put my code on their page so they are going with someone else. Thank you GOOGLE!! May I offer a suggestion, DO NOT COUNT ON GOOGLE TO ASSIST YOU SHOULD YOU NEED THEIR ASSISTANCE. DO THINGS VERY CAREFULLY SO YOU DON'T GET LOCKED OUT OF YOUR ACCOUNT.

So, my solution for now is to remove all of my Google code and replace it with Yahoo! code. Who knows, Google may have done me a favor. I may find that Yahoo is better than Google. I know for a fact that contacting customer service is a whole lot easier at Yahoo!

If anyone has any suggestions as to how I can get into my account . . I'm all ears. I'm really disappointed in Google right now. How they can lock a person out of their account and not provide a method to rectify it is beyond me.

Oh well . . . Off to Yahoo! to see if maybe they aren't a little better prepared to serve their customers.