It's Me, It's Me, It's C.E.D.

Oh man, oh man, oh man. Where do I start?

It's been a wild week for me, and it has little to nothing to do with sports; though it will be mentioned. In a span of a number of days, I went from bewildered, to panicked, to frustrated, to nearly on the point to tears, to finally receiving some relief, answers, and a solution. It was one hell of a test for me, and thankfully, I passed with flying colors.

With all of that said, gather 'round, kiddies. I do have a story to tell.

January 19

On Sunday, January 19, I wrote this recap of this year's Divisional Playoff, which ended with the Ravens/Bills game. I was not happy with the Bills winning, because I sensed that Bills fans would be absolutely extra regarding this result. They have been, but not to the extent I feared. So yeah, I had written this, and was on to the Conference Championship in a week, but I had to go through a few things first, and prepare for certain things.

Those "certain things" would be the least of my worries.

January 20-21

From the minute I woke up on the morning of January 20, my only focus was to maintain my sanity. The day was all about MLK, the National Championship, and Wild @ Avalanche. Nothing else was going on that day. ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. As I said, that would be the least of my problems. I went to Vocal, and saw that I was logged out. Strange. So I tried to log back in. Couldn't. At the time, I didn't think much of it. I've had this happen before, and I figured that it was a hiccup that would be fixed in a few hours. But when it wasn't, I asked around. No one else had this problem.

Finally, I contacted Vocal, and I've always loved this about Vocal: questions always get answered on the next morning. I've contacted Support before, and like clockwork, when I wake up in the morning, there's a response. Sure enough, on the morning of January 21, I got the response. I was told that my account was suspended for violating community guidelines. I couldn't believe it! The first thing I did was take a look back at my last story, the aforementioned Divisional Playoff recap. I couldn't find violations. Other people I sent the story to couldn't find violations. Speaking of couldn't find, I couldn't find a lot of my stories. OMG.

Even so, I felt this had to be an error. Sure enough:

January 22-23

On the morning of January 22, I received the response I expected: the suspension was an error. So Vocal began the process of getting my account back, and I was seeing a lot of my stories returning, but here's the thing: there were quite a few issues still. For one, my name. Those who see my writings know that my name is Clyde E. Dawkins. The middle initial was missing. Also, my profile had no header and no profile photo. And I still couldn't log in.

Even so, I saw my stories coming back bit by bit. Some of my subscribers noticed and contacted me. I told them what was going on, but one of them told me what was really the issue:

January 24

In the early hours of January 24, Mariann Carroll reached out to me and, after learning about my problem, asked me to change my password. She had suspected the real issue. Someone hacked my Vocal account. Sure enough, I changed my PW, and I got access to my account back. I was able to log in. So that was one problem solved. But there was another problem: Not all of my stories were back. Only 964 stories were shown up. I had written 1550 stories since joining Vocal in April 2021 (this story is #1551). That meant that 586 stories were not showing up, and I was just shattered. I had been on the verge of tears during this whole thing, and while I was happy that I was back on, I felt so incomplete. 586 stories, just over one-third of my work on Vocal, was unaccounted for.

So I sent a message to Support, because if anyone can fix this, it was them. Vocal had been wonderful to me during the whole thing, that's a fact. As I was almost finished with the message, I ended up finding out where the missing stories were: they became drafts. 586 stories saved as drafts. Oh boy. No surprise, they came through for me again; they expressed their sympathies, and they put back all of my stories in no time. Vocal really helped me out.

Before this, I had to redo my profile again, placing the profile photo and the header up. So yeah, in the immortal words of Aerosmith, "I'm back in the saddle again!" Oh, and regarding my Vocal Wallet, thankfully, all is in order. Nothing was taken by the hacker(s).

In Closing

I want to thank Vocal for helping me through this whole ordeal, and for being so patient with me. I also want to thank Mariann for helping me as well, and keeping my spirits up when I was down regarding this whole thing. And I thank everyone who has read my stories, and more are coming. I need to catch up on my Colorado Avalanche recaps for this season, and that will be covered in one story.

Once again, thank you so very very much!