because people are nice

along with ten thousand or so other blogger users, I was offered a gmail account a few weeks ago. I didn't think much about it, except that to have a free web-based e-mail account with a 1Gb capacity instead of the measly Hotmail 3 Mb limit sounded like a good idea. but I decided to go for it anyway, even though I can only use it on the pc, as it doesn't work on macs running pre-OSX. then, a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that for every one of us who now has a gmail account there are many more who desperately want one, for various reasons, and that there's a website been set up where people are posting what they'll trade for an invite (each one of us was given the chance to invite two others to apply for an account). it seemed utterly absurd to me that some people should be prepared to pay up to £50 for an invite - I find that vaguely obscene - but some of the offers of trade were quite fun - in the typically american high school sense - like a personalised mix-cd, or a guided tour of downtown Seattle or whatever. having skimmed through a couple of dozen, my eye settled on two in particular: firstly, a young pastor working with disadvantaged kids in new york, and secondly, a young geek from Louisiana with lots of space on his server: the former wasn't offering anything in exchange, but sounded deserving, the latter was offering virtually unlimited storage and bandwidth. I contacted both, and we struck the deals, and the invitations were sent. that was ten days ago. the pastor hasn't been in touch since, so I don't even know if the invitation got to him. the geek has stopped replying to my e-mails saying I hadn't a clue what he was talking about (lots of unintelligible acronyms - OC3, ATM, SSH) and why can't I just ftp to his server like I do to the others I use using such a username with such a password without getting error messages all the time. I still (honestly - I know I'm naive but I did check them both out - the pastor's current e-mail address is with a theological college and the geek's is on his website - which shows him to be a geek but an honest enough geek) don't believe either of them intended to cheat me, but I just don't understand why they're both being so damn rude. plus I was looking forward to putting much more music on the site - which otherwise requires my purchasing much more webspace. POOH! I say and POOH! again.