Background:
A person to whom I have provided long-distance tech support for many years was having difficulty with their internet connection one weekend a year ago.
This person called tech support, couldn't understand the person at the support call centre located overseas, got frustrated, and hung up. Called back a couple of times until they found someone whose English was sufficiently capable, and on that opportunity, now suitably worked up and with no shortage of pre-existing prejudice, told them to just cancel the service.
This person then called another local ISP for internet service. I wasn't consulted on this move.
You can guess what happened next. Existing ISP cut off service, including access to email. New ISP eventually got things hooked up again. But my 'client' expected to still have access to an email account that no longer worked. And of course, their AppleID was this email address.
For reasons I cannot understand, the AppleID became inaccessible. Security questions would not match answers that were written down.... even the birthday came up incorrect. No way to reset the password, because the email address tied to that AppleID was now inaccessible. This person decided the best course of action was to open an new AppleID, and got on with life, and went off camping and travelling, leaving this issue unresolved.
...until it came time to do something with the Mac App Store. Certain expensive apps, like Aperture, and FotoMagico, a few others, were now tied to the old AppleID. So installation of those apps on her new laptop were impossible without it.
I've provided exact instructions and even a bloody script to follow when talking to Apple Support. But after FIVE calls to Support, the folks on the other end of the line have managed to make a second AppleID (now tied to a gmail account) inaccessible and have created a third that required for some unknown reason a 24-hour wait for a reset email to come from Apple's support server. But none of the tech support people have addressed the original AppleID issue. It's like they've been dancing around it, not wanting to open a Pandora's box or something.
Tomorrow we have another tech support call scheduled, and we'll attempt to bring me in on a conference call with the support person to try and understand why this is taking so long to resolve. My client thinks that they were told or it was inferred that during an earlier tech support call a few months ago that the Support person deleted the original AppleID for some reason.
Quite a mess. So let this serve as a recommendation that you be very sure of your passwords, keep your security question answers written down or stored somewhere securely, and add a secondary "rescue" email address to your AppleID profile. Because if you lose control of that ID, man, all hell breaks loose...
Will update when/if we're able to resolve this little nightmare....
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