Film Noir

This past summer, the file transfer service that I had long used to share films and recordings from my LEXinars — TransferBigFiles — basically took a giant dump on my work life. Sometime in June, my clients stopped receiving their links to download the films, and the uploads would expire without being received. After several weeks and many emails, it was finally determined that the Amazon Web Services email service that TBF was using was out of whack. I believe that is an official diagnosis.

It turns out that TBF knew about the problem but did not notify me (or, apparently, anyone else). When all was revealed, I called TBF’s customer service to file a complaint, as it created an enormous amount of extra work for me. The man I spoke with, Alex, refused to let me speak with a supervisor, claimed to be the only person at TBF, and then, in the middle of our phone call, he deleted my whole account. This means that I not only lost all of my active uploads; I also lost the record of everything I had sent and to whom over the past few years. It was a nightmare. Make all the Karen jokes you want (though I think they’re rude and misogynistic, especially to women actually named Karen), but I filed complaints with the BBB and other agencies. TBF simply claimed that they deleted my account “on accident,” and it was Asshole’s word against mine. Er, I mean Alex’s.

TBF did refund my year’s subscription, but a $48 refund was hardly recompense for the enormous headache and disruption to my work and my clientele.

I have spent the rest of the summer and most of the fall promising my clients that I would get their films out eventually, and evading email messages along the lines of “Did I miss an email with a link to download the films?” [NO! No, you did not. Please stop it.] I have tried using four different transfer services, none of which worked for me. Two of them did not keep any record of previous transfers, so they didn’t work out for me. Another apparently just sent emails to everyone’s junk folder, as no one downloaded the materials I sent. The fourth was cost-prohibitive for the features I needed.

I finally decided to use Google Drive, which costs me nothing, keeps a record, and is pretty easy to navigate. And the best news of all is that I’m all caught up on uploading and sharing films, handouts, and recordings from the summer and fall of 2021. And it only took me four months. It probably took longer than it would’ve had I not been packing and shipping my kid off to college in another state, but regardless, I’m sorry it took so long.

Fingers crossed that this works well on an ongoing basis. I don’t enjoy not delivering on my promises; it puts me in a dark mood. At least now, the mystery’s been solved, and there’s a happy ending.