Anthony Stauffer

If you use Google Apps, or if you simply use Google’s Products for business, you need to read this.

This is not a rant about Google’s policy of disabling accounts without a human review process. These are steps that saved me during one of the angriest days I’ve ever had.

The Problem

Google prohibits people under the age of 13 from having an account with them. More specifically, Google’s account software disables your account if you enter a birthdate that falls within 13 years past of today’s date.

Summary: If you accidentally tell Google that you’re under 13 years of age, your account will be disabled until you verify your age, or it will be deleted after 29 days.

(In my case, I attempted to add YouTube to my Google Apps account and forgot to change the birth year. I had not activated Google Checkout, and could not login to activate it because my account was disabled).

What You Need To Do

Activate Google Checkout

Go activate Google Checkout for your account. If your account gets disabled because of a stupid mistake, and you don’t have Google Checkout enabled, the other options for unlocking your account take days, and you’ve only got 29 days to get this right.

Create A Backup Administrator Account

If you, like me, signed up for Google Apps as a one person company, you may be tempted to use your own account as the sole administrator account. Do not do this.

Go right now and create a backup administrator account that you only use for emergencies. This is the only thing that saved me. Because my account was locked, I could not log in to enable Google Checkout. Remembering that I had a backup administrator account allowed me to login, enable Google Checkout and proceed with age verification.

Become a Paying Member

Before this happened, I was using the free version of Google Apps. Unfortunately, free means ‘no telephone support’ because to use telephone support with Google Apps, you need a customer ID. And unless you’re paying, you don’t get a customer ID.

Once you’ve signed up for a paying account, find your Customer ID, and record it in Evernote, or somewhere outside of your Google Apps dashboard. In the event you need to call support, you don’t want to depend on being able to login to your account to get this information.

Most of you are smarter than I am, so you’ll never find yourself with a disabled account. But after a brief moment of mindlessness, it’s terrifying to think of being locked out of the account from which you communicate with customers.

Here’s a video I made a few years ago for a financial seminar at my church. During that time, my wife and I were finishing a 14 month and $41,000 debt-crushing sprint.  For much of that time, most of our monthly income went towards debt, more than what we lived on.

On a related note, I watched a documentary tonight about the rise in consumer debt in America. What a fantastically complex issue. I am not an economist. I know only enough to know that pure, unrestrained capitalism is as bad as whatever -ism is being attributed to Obama by Fox News this week.

Is it the government’s job to protect us by regulating credit card companies? Or are we to fend for ourselves? It’s really too bad that those are the choices we’re presented with in so much political rhetoric. Either choice, taken to its extreme is an awful reality.

As much as it makes my skin crawl to hear how blatantly the banks target the poor in this country, at the end of the day, people make their own choices, buying things they can’t afford. But….given the right amount of regulation, some of those people would never have had the option to get into that big of a mess. And I’m not sure I think that that amount of government regulation is a bad thing.

It’s easy to blame someone for getting themselves into a big financial mess. And it feels good to blame a bank for making it possible. But it’s a shared responsibility.

There’s also an education angle as well. How much of the financial trouble we see in poorer families is the result of poor financial literacy. There are things that are obvious to financial experts that seem a mystery to me. Likewise, simple principles of credit and debt, obvious to me, are a mystery to others. But who’s responsibility is to teach them? The government? The schools?

In the end, the only thing I’m sure of is that people need to act ethically, morally, and use common sense when dealing with money. Yes, banks would make less money if they didn’t troll for bankrupt individuals. Yes, people would have less stuff if they learned to act their wage. But it’s the right thing to do.  When people in any wealth bracket decide to do the wrong thing because it pays better, we all lose in the long run.

Several years ago, Seagate had a big problem with its Barracuda 1TB drives. The firmware would cause the drive to lock up, and the drive became undetectable by the system. Data intact, drive invisible.

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