You may have noticed that Foray was late coming out, or rather that there was no January issue, and that we are having to include that work as part of a January/February combination issue. This type of thing has happened before, due to editorial overworking--i.e. I have a day job or two. This time, however, it is due to an entirely different phenomenon. I have been fighting the incredible apathy that overcomes agencies authorized by the government to have a monopoly over some part of our lives. To be specific, I have been trying for over 5 weeks, every single day, to get InterNIC to transfer my domain. It has been a waste of valuable time and the source of great frustration. It has wasted literally hours and hours of time that would have been otherwise spent on Foray and other writing concerns of mine.

Please, do us a favor, and, in the long run, yourself a favor. Write a letter to InterNIC. Complain about their lack of effort with the blueprince.com domain. Tell them that you do not appreciate their flagrant abuse of governmental monopoly power. This time it may be just me they are ignoring, or perhaps just me and however many of other hundreds of people are similarly getting shafted out there. But next time, it could be you. Do something now. Write ahead of time. Join the effort. We at Foray will thank you in our hearts and hopefully in the improvement of our website once such stupid timestealing fights are behind us. 

If you need help from Network Solutions, the designated InterNIC agency company right now, forget messing with those online forms, useless emails and customer service lines. They just don't work. Foray spent over 6 weeks filling out every type of online form or email form that Network Solutions had to offer. All we ever got were auto-responders and error messages. We tried calling the proper and correct phone numbers. All we ever got was a busy signal. We tried reporting Network Solutions to the FCC. All we got was an auto-responder. We solicited help from our readers. You may have helped, we aren't sure, since nobody at InterNIC ever mentioned it. We filled out the InterNIC Customer Satisfaction survey. Finally, I got an email from the Customer Satisfaction department thanking me for my helpful suggestions--what? Did they even read them? But there it was, a new phone number, right there in the email, a number not listed anywhere I had noticed on the InterNIC website. Would it work? We called it, and got an answering machine, and in despair left a message. Oh well.

A half hour later, we gave up and left for early dinner. It seemed as though we would never get the help we needed. When I returned home, though, there were two messages on my machine. A gentleman named Bill Oliver had called, twice in fact, to speak to me about the problems I was having with my domain. He even left a phone number, his direct line. Wow, now we were getting somewhere. The next day I called him and within an hour he had updated all of our domain information; by the next morning blueprince.com was active once again. 

I've never met Mr. Bill Oliver, but he sounds like an older gentleman, with one of those kind voices you only hear from the wise owners of candy shops in children's movies. He was forthright and friendly. I forgot for a moment that I was talking to an employee of a company that had run me in circles for weeks. I felt like I was being helped by someone who genuinely cared. That is a rare quality in our age of automated touchtone mazes and tech support people who alternately treat you like a number or a thorn in their side. I can only hope that Network Solutions treats Mr. Oliver with the same kind way he treats people instead of the cold impersonal manner the rest of the organization seems to possess.

Bill Oliver, I hope you will take this as the ultimate compliment that it is meant to be. People, if you need Network Solutions to help you, call 703-834-2433, and ask for Bill Oliver, the only helpful InterNIC employee we have ever discovered. And tell him that Conrad Hubbard says thanks.