Can you believe the drama? I can’t. Which brings me back to my Heather Show theory. You see, my life isn’t really real. I’m onto their scheme. You remember that movie, ‘The Truman Show’? It was really just a clue – someone was warning me about what’s going on. The past few weeks have confirmed it for me.

Why? Because my luck has entirely disappeared. My car is a mess, my blog disappeared (as I’m sure you noticed), and all the while, the weirdest things have been happening. It’s all for the sake of sweeps month. Yes, we’ve entered the month of May, and it’s time for the networks to pull out all the stops in order to attract more viewers. Now I’m just waiting for the inevitable celebrity guest appearance.

Let’s start with the drama of the disappearing domain name. Why have I been without my domain for nearly two weeks? Because of the stupidity of three companies. In the beginning, exactly four years ago, I registered DProphet.com with a company called 11net. In my contract, they were supposed to notify me when my domain would expire. Funny, I never received any such notification and my domain expired. Whoops. When I went to their website to renew it, the website wouldn’t work. Why? Because 11net went out of business two years ago.

Hmm, what to do now. I learned that 11net was bought out by a company called Bizland. It turned out, however, that both Bizland and 11net were domain resellers – they didn’t have DNS access themselves, they bought it through a parent company called Tucows. Confused yet? It gets worse.

So I called Bizland. They said that anyone could initiate a transfer. So I went to my new hosting company, Dreamhost, and paid them $25 to transfer the domain. It said everything was good, that it would be transferred in 5 to 10 days, and that in the process they would also renew the domain for another year. Problem solved. At least, so I thought.

I waited six days. Nothing happened. There weren’t any signs of anything happening. I called Dreamhost. They said that oh no, they could’t renew it, what was I talking about? I checked their website again – sure enough, it said my $25 would renew it. But the tech support guy said there was no way they could transfer the domain, because it still belonged to Tucows. I demanded my money back – who knows if that’s happened yet.

I called Bizland. They said it would be no problem – for $20 they’d activate my domain and then I’d be able to transfer it to whoever I wanted. I said, go for it. I paid them the money, I did everything they told me to, and I waited 48 to 72 hours for my domain to “activate”.

72 hours later, nothing happened. I called Tucows – they told me that they knew 11net was extinct, but that any other reseller on their network would be able to renew my domain. I called Bizland, got a different tech support guy on the phone, and told him what Tucows said. He said it wasn’t true, and he also told me that everything the other Bizland tech support guy had told me was absolutely untrue. They couldn’t renew the domain because it belonged to 11net. He suggested I contact someone at 11net, despite the fact that 11net has been extinct for over two years. In fact, I had tried emailing them several times the week before – some emails bounced back, and the one that went through never got a reply.

I explained this to the tech support guy, but he wouldn’t hear of it. I was frustrated – this was the second time I’d paid someone money, and they didn’t do what they said they would do. I demanded to speak to a manager. I got Darrell on the phone, who said that he’d work on it. Three hours later he calls me back, and says that he’s got everything figured out. He says I need to call Vince, someone at the parent company Tucows. He says it’s Tucows’ fault for not letting Bizland register the domain. For some reason, Tucows put it on register-hold, even though I never ever told them to.

So I called Vince. Bear in mind it has been a week and a half at this point, and I’ve spent six hours of my day fighting with various companies, repeating my story, and wasting time that I should have been spent working on something *very* important.

After trying for an hour to get the right extension – because Darrell accidentally gave me the wrong one – and bouncing from one department to the next, I just start randomly pressing numbers. I get a man on the phone and tell my story. Wouldn’t you know it, I happened to get a hold of Vince, through entirely random means. (See? Told you this wasn’t real, this is so definitely a planned TV show.) Vince told me he talked to Darrell, and he asked me what Darrell told me. I told him that Darrell said if I just gave Vince the nichandle “bizlandcom” that Vince would be able to free my domain name from register-handle and that I could call Bizland back immediately, and they’d be able to activate my domain.

For the umpti-umpth time, I was told this was untrue. Vince started spitting out buzzwords at me that were making no sense, but finally he said, “I can do this, this, this, and this, and most likely your domain will be ready in the next few minutes.”

I couldn’t take it anymore. I asked him again, “Are you sure that’s all that needs to be done?” He was getting rude. He decided to remind me that if I didn’t renew my domain before the “30 day grace period” was up, I’d have to pay Tucows even more money – about $150 – all because they screwed up. I was angry – this was their own freaking fault, I’d done everything I possibly could, and yet both Tucows and their resellers couldn’t stick by their business contracts. I said as calmly as I possibly could, “Look, if my domain gets to that point, I’m not paying. Instead, I’ll be suing Tucows.” He laughed at me. He laughed at me! Then he said, “You couldn’t get us on anything.” I threw it back in his face and said, “Excuse me? Fraud? Breach of contract? Oh yes I could.” He laughed again and said, “Yeah, you go ahead and try. Good luck with that, but you’ll never get us on it.”

Was that a hint of experience I smelled in his mocking laughter?

I called Bizland back, nearly broke down in tears, as yet another tech support guy said nothing had changed, he couldn’t transfer the domain, and that I needed to contact 11net.

At that point I went downstairs and tried to explain to my Mother what was going on. My brother Kevin had just arrived as well to pick up his son. As I was explaining what happened, I started crying from the stress and frustration of it all. I felt like my own domain was being held hostage, just waiting until my 30 days were up so they could slap me with a bigger bill. Kevin said that everything that had happened was a load of crap, and he said he’d come help.

He called Bizland for me. They fed him the same crap they fed me, and I don’t feel like we got any closer to a solution. Kevin said he figured out what the problem was, but I don’t really know if it was any different from what Bizland and Tucows were telling me. But at least they didn’t give him the run around, because he sounded far more confident in his knowledge of domain names.

By this point, it was nearly 7:00 at night. I was tired, I was really hungry, and I was frustrated. So I went to Don Pablos because it was Wednesday Fajita Night, where the fajitas are only $7.99. When I got home, I started working on a surrogate blog that I was intending to upload to meggers.com. These past two weeks I’ve gone through serious blog withdrawl. I’ve felt left out of something, shut in, unable to communicate en masse. So many people have sent me emails and IMs, asking what happened, and I just wanted the chance to vent this whole story. I didn’t think my domain would come back any time soon, so I created a “blog go bye-bye” blog, that would have kept me happy until this one returned. It was really cute, too… maybe I’ll transfer the blog over to Meggers.org anyway and use the new design. It was so funny. Or maybe I’ll just use the design for something else, we’ll see.

Either way, I’m happy my domain is back. I’m glad I don’t have to go on a rampage at Tucows. Although, I still don’t know why my domain is working – nothing on my whois report has changed one bit. Nothing. It still says I’m registered through 11net. I’m going to have to get that fixed somehow so I can get it transferred completely away from those idiots at Tucows. Man they suck. If you’re with them, transfer away *now*.

But as for right now, I’ve got some writing to do. I’m working on a very important project right now. So I guess I’ll tell you about it later, as well as what’s happened to my baby (i.e. my BMW.) It’s a tale of great sadness, I can promise you that. So tune in next time, same Heather place, same Heather channel.