Techno-gymnastics (I Think I Made That Up)

I just endured about an hour and a half of techno-gymnastics changing my email password. Why did I do this? Because I got an email the other day saying I had to "upgrade" my email account or else it would be deactivated. For someone who really struggles with technology, it was a bit frustrating. Not as frustrating as the last time, I will say. Which means, I hope, that I am improving on getting anxious about the stuff. I did not grow up on screens like my younger peers. So, the scam email got my password, by telling me I was signing into my account and they were going to send me a code, which they did not send. I tried what I had as the "help" email address to communicate my problem and just got a message that the "help" number was not able to receive the message, which told me that email address for "help" is not valid. Anyway, I tried an online service that was a "chat" and, long story short, they wanted me to pay them $5 which was supposed to be refunded after I filled out the form (which was for me to fill in my credit card information). The fine print said I was going to be charged $65 a month for "joining" their help service. I got out of that. They did say that the email was probably a scam though, but then they wanted me to sign up for their service and be able to talk to a representative (for $65 a month, presumably). Next, (I'm trying to make this short) I ended up having to go to my work email and get a text message code and my home email and get a text message code, and of course this was after "two party verification." Anyway, I did finally get my password changed and can access my email on my phone and my laptop. The other thing like that happened is that I got a text invitation to a luncheon on Sunday afternoon and it had who the invitation was from and what time, but not the location. They wanted me to download some app in order to get that information. So I messaged my friend and asked him where the luncheon was going to be and for some reason he didn't get the message. I don't know if he had them turned off or what but I got a text from him explaining that the luncheon invitation was a scam. I saw him later and he said the invitation must have gone out to hundreds of people because he was getting all these emails asking him the same thing I had asked him. My goodness, you know, earlier this afternoon I was thinking about wouldn't it be nice just not to have email at all, because it really is kind of time-consuming deleting 30 or 40 or 100 emails a day, and, of course, somebody wants to sell you a service to limit that or something, and, by the way, my email provider also is actually selling an "upgrade," but I don't want an upgrade. I've had the same email address for maybe 30 years. It's so old it's got my whole name on it, no numbers or anything, and I like it, and I don't want to change it. And what was pretty cool about it, the Google Password Manager even has my new email password updated. But they still had the old one. They said I had two accounts! So I had to Google that and they said all you had to do was delete the old one. So, now it's done. I am getting tired. I hope I haven't bored you to tears with this sad saga, but, you know, I actually hope someone might benefit from hearing about two more scams going around. I don't know what else to say about these scams. They seem to be reproducing like, I don't know, viruses, and speaking of viruses, I seem to have one. This laryngitis I had? It's getting better, but it seems to be actually upper respiratory in origin, I believe, and brought on, or helped along or something by allergies, which creates another dilemma, namely if you take antihistamines for your allergies you might dry out your vocal cords, and so my eyes have been itching and running besides being hardly able to speak still after almost a week. So I'm going to quit to get this in before midnight. Meanwhile, you all, stay alert to scams. Don't be giving your email address to any suspicious text messages. You may as well go ahead and change your password, I guess. Goodnight.