Creative Mistakes

OK, this story starts two years ago when I purchased a Barnes and Noble card during the Christmas holidays. I was book wrapping there a lot to earn money for the cat shelter, and I ended up saving more money than I spent on the card from the discounts I got on meals there. You have to register the card online, and I registered it under a Gmail account.

Then, a year later, I was given a Nook as a present. Nooks must be registered online, so I registered it under my Hotmail account. My Hotmail account is a trash account that I mostly use when I anticipate getting a lot of junk mail if I release my email address to someone.

Since that time I have left the Barnes and Noble card expire because I didn’t have the money to renew it and I wasn’t all that sure that I’d be getting my money’s worth if I did renew it. The Nook registration, however, has been much more active, since I’m buying the occasional e-book and actually paying attention to the related emails on new e-releases and sales.

I decided I wanted to change the email address on my Nook registration to my Gmail account. I went to the B&N’s site to do this, but it turns out that I am not allowed; you cannot change a Nook email address to an email address that is previously registered, regardless of whether or not it has a Nook already registered to it.

So I decided the thing to do was delete my Gmail account with Barnes and Noble and then register my Nook under the Gmail account. Unfortunately, B&N provides no way to remove an account once you’ve signed up for it. You can stop all mailings to an email address, but you can’t actually obliterate the email address from their files.

Granted, this is an error of my own manufacture. I’ve known about this for a year, and lived with it for the same amount of time. But for some reason this morning I took it into my head that this must be something I could fix if only I were patient and persistent enough. Armed with this attitude I bashed my little e-brains out against the e-brick e-wall at the e-Barnes and Noble. It wasn’t pretty. By the end of my attempts the cats were all hiding at the opposite side of the house. The net result (pun intended) from all my attempts to find a way to either cancel an account or move a Nook to another existing account was that “you can’t get there from here”.

I gave up and sent an email to B&N’s help desk. I figure that by this time next year I’ll have my answer.