Hotmail wants to break up with me but doesn’t know how to tell me because we’ve been together for so long and I’m really a nice person.

I have 445 pages of emails in my inbox. Of those, 2362 are unread. I am not exaggerating for comic effect, I just looked it up. It’s a hotmail account I’ve had since 2002. My work email also dumps into it. I pay extra for it so I can send really big fat graphics-filled emails. And I hate it with every fiber in my being. But I can’t get rid of it, because there’s just so much stuff in there. It’s like a storage unit full of crap that I don’t really want, but I can’t just walk away because hidden in between the out-of-date skis and your ex-boyfriend’s roommates sofa that you somehow got stuck with because he moved back to Michigan, there’s some old pictures and a box of yearbooks you’d kinda like to hang onto.

Every year or so in an effort planned primarily to piss me off, hotmail “upgrades the system.” That is Microsoft talk for totally switching it around, moving all the buttons, screwing with the font size and taking away at least 4 really useful functions that I like. There’s also a lot “CURM00000000000000000000::000000” and I don’t even want to know what that means. New versions are always really cool and interesting to at least one guy in Redmond, WA, but I’m certain no one ever tries them out on a Mac platform except me. By the time I work out all the kinks, I get about 4 peaceful months, and then I wake up to WE’VE UPGRADED!

My ultimate favorite is the message I get when I’m trying to search my massive inbox for a specific message. After a little teaser status bar claims to be “Loading…” for about 60 seconds, it will just give up.

“AHA!” you’re thinking. “Dumb girl. It’s because your inbox is too full.” And that’s what I’d think too, but I get this message:

There was a problem with the Windows Live Hotmail service.
It has nothing to do with your computer.

So it’s essentially saying, “It’s not you. It’s me.” Great. Hotmail loves me, but it’s not IN LOVE with me. Oh well. At least I have its roommates’ sofa.

(Does it frighten anyone besides me that spellchecker is totally good with CURM000000?)