HOT PURSUIT

From the start I should have known this was a prickly road to go down. But it’s funny how your mind works and stays focused in ways that lead you down a tough path.

Seventeen years ago, when I purchased what was then the Blooming Prairie Times, I set up my work email account with the address of bprick@frontier.com. As I’m sure you can see, at least what I saw at the time, the email consisted of “b-p” for Blooming Prairie and “rick” for my first name. Frontier Communications was the provider at the time.

Simple enough, right?

I cruised along with no issues for several years when finally someone confronted me about my email. And once it was brought to my attention, it seemed like suddenly everyone was questioning it. They couldn’t understand why I would have an email of “b” “prick.”

Wait, I exclaimed. It’s “bp” “rick,” I quickly fired back at people. For some reason, they weren’t buying it. I think they thought I was trying to make some sort of statement about my personality or something.

Now I’ll admit I can get a little prickly at times, but certainly not to the extent of being labeled as a first-class “prick.” Actually, in the world of journalism, being called a prick is probably a compliment compared to some names used toward me in the past.

But at any rate, I have no intentions of wanting to be known as an annoying person or labeled with such a vulgar insult. I guess, one could argue, I set myself up for this. And to me there was no easy way out of it.

I couldn’t believe I had found myself in such a predicament. How could I have gone so many years without even catching the prick part of it? I was always focused on “bp” “rick” when giving out my email that it never even crossed my mind that something may be afoul with my email identity.

After we expanded countywide and became the Steele County Times years later, I established a new email of rbussler@steelecountytimes.com. While the “bprick” email remained with me, it became secondary.

However, I stubbornly hung onto the bprick email not because I wanted to be known as a prick but rather for reasons of where I didn’t want to get lost in the email cyber world. I know how hard it’s to transition to new emails and get folks on the other end to make such a change.

If there’s one thing in life, I am consistent. Heck, I still have my personal email account that I established at least 26 years ago. No reference to prick in that email. I’ve seen people battle with email changes in the past, and it most often is not pretty.

A few months back Frontier began phasing out emails by basically locking out people by trying to get them to upgrade with more storage. I had not shelled out a single penny for that prickly email account for many years, and I wasn’t to begin now.

So, by no choice of my own, the “bprick” email finally succumbed to a slow death. It’s no longer active. I’m sure people on the other end are shouting, “It’s about time, prick!”

Now, people are forced to use my more professional email, even though “bprick” seemed qualified at the time it was set up 17 years ago.

It has given lots of folks some good chuckles over the years, and of course, at my own expense. It turns out the joke was on me.

If anything, it has given me a great lesson on how things can be viewed in different ways due to individual perception filters and contextual differences. It also goes to show how people can see the same things differently.

At least I’ve been able to be in hot pursuit of surviving the prickly world of email for all these years.