This is a very short blog – because, to a lot of people, the problems I’ve had with Twitter over the last fortnight are boring and tedious.

And I agree. But this is a rant that’s turned the air in my study blue recently and I need to vent. Please feel  free to leave at this point, if you wish. I won’t take offence.

Each day, after a couple of hours writing/editing the last book of my Pattern trilogy I’d treat myself to half an hour of Twitter. But I’d become complacent  (you are allowed to say ‘dozy’ here) about the ease with which I clicked on the Tweet button and dashed off a few Tweets, Re-tweets, Favourites and replies. .

Nothing could go wrong. Surely?

It did! One morning I logged on to my PC to read the message ” Your Twitter account has been compromised. Please change you password”. There was only one problem. I’ve been on Twitter since 2009 on @judithbarrow. Way back then I’d signed on with an email address through BT. A year or so ago we changed everything to Sky and, for one reason and another I stopped using my BT account. When I returned to that email address it was blocked; we were no longer connected to BT. I thought no more about it; I didn’t use it for anything anyway. Big mistake. I’d forgotten I’d used it to sign on to Twitter. It didn’t occur to me because, by now Twitter was using my every day email address for all notifications.

But there was a problem – a big problem. When it all went wrong two weeks ago Twitter wouldn’t accept my up to date email address. Nor my user name, nor my back-up email address, nor my mobile number. I’d become a non-person! Even though these were all on my settings. ” No problem”, the on-line Help site said “Identify your problem” I did. “Try this,” it said and “This” and “This “… again and again and again  …

No use. I appealed for help from every social media site I’m on and, for ten days, I tried everything that anyone suggested.

Until, in the end, the message came up ” We’re sorry we’re unable to help you.”

It was obvious I needed my old BT email address. And the only way was to contact BT. To cut a long laborious story here Bt couldn’t help.

One Facebook ‘friend’ said, “What’s all the fuss about? Collecting Followers is only like collecting stamps.” And to some, it might seem like that. But over the years, I’d been in contact on Twitter with some interesting people, learned quite a lot on so many different subjects and been given the opportunity to read books I wouldn’t have found any other way. On the other hand, I hope I’ve also helped other writers into the spotlight (if only for a few days), made friends in countries I’ll never have chance to visit and had the opportunity to find fellow bloggers (and read far more interesting posts than this!)

But then I decided I’d jumped through enough hoops.

Life’s too short.  So here I am, back on Twitter @barrow_judith. Hoping to meet some new interesting people and catch up with some old friends again.  But the strange thing is @judithbarrow is still on-line – and some of my links from other sites are still being posted there. And I’ve even managed to ‘follow’ myself!!

Links to my books:

http://www.honno.co.uk/dangos.php?ISBN=9781906784058

http://amzn.to/128qyEm

http://www.honno.co.uk/dangos.php?ISBN=9781906784393

http://amzn.to/1wIhfs3

http://www.honno.co.uk/