Moving house is one thing. Moving e-house is proving to be quite another. I will be honest, and contrary to Firm policy, I have never had a personal email address, that is, until now. My whole life and existence, from Netflix to finance to any number of used and unused apps, websites and mailing lists are all tied to my professional email account. And one by one, as part of getting ready for the next chapter in my life, they all have to be changed. Sigh.

Mailing lists are easy. To be honest, I am using the most of this opportunity to simply “unsubscribe”. I don’t think I need to be on the mailing list of a Seoul hotel that I once stayed at 15 years ago with no plan on returning to. And this is to say nothing of the hundreds of legal content mailing lists from other law firms to conference organizers to legal search firms that seemed to have accumulated over the years like the excess kilograms in my middle. An email diet is a good thing. But do I really need a further email immediately telling me that I have unsubscribed and asking if it may have been by accident and if I wanted to subscribe again?

Apps have proven to be a little trickier. Some are easy and some, especially social media, are much more difficult. You of course first need to remember your log in details. And if you don’t, down you go the first rabbit hole of having to change passwords and login identification, only to then change it again.

Some apps, but not all seem to allow a change of an email addresses, some only with the insertion of code numbers sent separately to your old email and/or new email or both, followed by multiple confirmation emails and “press here” instructions, some of which seem to have be initiated from a second device. Some don’t even seem to allow an email change at all so I have to reach out to a live person. How 1990s of them.

And of course, in the great Canadian tradition of hating our telecom companies, they seem to be the absolute worst and most difficult to navigate. Imagine that. And don’t think of getting help by calling. So frustrating.

There will no doubt come a day when like ice farming was replaced by refrigeration, email will be replaced by something else which will be attached to us from birth to death. In the meantime, moving house and moving ehouse is just way too hard.