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Comment by DoreenMichele | Hacker News Reader

I'm seriously medically handicapped and have terrible eyesight issues. I typed the wrong password at first.

I still had 1 percent power on my phone earlier and was previously able to get a code on it and I hoped I could get one last code before it outright died, so I said "Yeah, sure, send it to my phone" since they don't really want to do it another way.

So then I had to ask another way when I couldn't get to it because that is when the phone gave up the ghost for good. And then they said "We shall send you a link in 24 hours." So I moved the sim card and got text messages saying "Was this you?" and I said "Yeah, it was." and cancelled my "account recovery process" and tried to continue setting up my new phone because the old one is dead.

And this is when Google decided I must be a for serious criminal and told me "We shall send you an email in 72 hours."

So I'm quite upset at this point.

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I think you should take your phone to a store which can fix your phone. Googles code doesn't come as an SMS it comes as a notification from the Google app. Almost lost an account to this last week. Turned off 2fa.

I'm in a small town. I have no car. I no longer drive. I don't see well enough.

I work from home due to my medical situation. I have no friends locally who can drive me someplace.

Etc etc etc.

This is a non-starter for me. I need Google to fix this. I can't do anything about the busted phone at this point.

On HN you might get access to someone at Google, or someone from here might drive TO you. Any takers? I’m on the wrong continent.

Sorry to hear about your situation. We really need to host our own email or utilize a paid service, but it becomes cumbersome and expensive. I'm not sure what the solution to this is.

On the off chance it helps, because I don't see anyone else mentioning it: could it be that your charging port is stuffed with lint? If you have a thin needle, try to poke inside and see how much material can you get out of the port.

Despite this being a common problem, it's not well recognized, and it's easy to forget about it too. I went through several charging cables and almost replaced my phone half a year ago, before I remembered - and sure enough, all my charging issues were caused by a layer of lint at the back of the port, that got compacted by the charging cable so well that it formed a flat "false wall". I forgot all about it, even though I've performed the exact same fix on other people's devices in the past.

Hope it helps; if not, I apologize for wasting your time.

Thank you. That is not the issue.

This has happened to me at least twice and it’s taken too long to realise each time. Further, even if you think you’ve cleaned it, it can need more. I’ve had to scrape away at it before it will charge, and even then sometimes only at an angle or with a book resting on the cable/connection. Given it’s not OP’s issue, hopefully these posts help someone else.

> even then sometimes only at an angle or with a book resting on the cable/connection

That’s probably mechanical stress causing the port to become loose. It can happen after a few years.

A plastic toothpick worked best for me, and it lowers the risk of scratching / piercing something with the needle.

How much are you paying for this service you need google to fix? I ask because with their paid email products there are a fair number of routes to get help, your admin, then if that doesn't work you can go up the chain... If you are on a free account you may not be (individually) worth a ton to google revenue wise and so support is going to be poor (they have 1.8billion+ ACTIVE gmail users I think - if they increase costs by $5/user, that's a $10B expense. )

Does helping you look like potentially helping a hacker take over an account, recognizing that google deals with totally crazy state level attacks? Google faces some significant liability and risk here.

Would you pay google to make it worth their time to help you (I actually think this should be an option - if a physical in person visit + someones time is what it takes - then google should have some system for $500 + you get to their office somewhere to recover your account)

I've had relatives in this situation. If you do know someone at a large institution with an institutional relationship I think you can sometimes get help - I had a relative go this route, wasn't sure if the IT folks there just figured out how to fix / work within google, or could escalate somewhere to get it addressed.

Because google will worry about reps selling access to account resets - they may REALLY lock this stuff down, so even if a rep wanted to help, they may not be able to (insider attacks a big issue again especially state sponsored attacks).

It's pretty tone-deaf to tell someone who's posted about being poor and previously homeless that they should have to pay Google $500 to recover their account.

Honestly to be expected here. I opened up about my own homelessness while being employed in my field of study for over 20 years. I received a bunch of vitriol and downvotes for my honesty. If ever you need a reminder that you are surrounded by "anarcho-capitalists" just scroll through any HN comments field pertaining to the intersection of ethics and the economy.

HN is a big forum, so you get all kinds here, but it is at least not mod policy to actively encourage membership to target and hate on its poorest members as was done to me elsewhere while I was homeless -- on a forum that gets chatted up an excessive amount as some wonderful online space.

There's a lot of abstract victim-blaming here re articles etc, and for sure the SV set for the most part is pretty clueless about the real world (though it looks like it's coming for them!).

But people here seem a bit less threatened by very poor individuals actually posting here than in most online places. I know from my own experience that mentioning you're homeless is usually a red rag to a bull. Add that you're an unemployed software developer, and the self-loathing middle class is often very quickly off on a hate-rampage. Less so here, for some reason. Perhaps just because people here are focused on topics of common interest, so if you're a loser (generally hated by the winners, worried that by the grace of providence they might have been you ..), at least you're one of our losers?

I don’t know all the conditions of your devices, and your accounts, so I don’t know if this will even help. It’s probably too late for this advice and your Google account, but maybe for other accounts. If not you, hopefully someone else who reads this.

Many accounts that support 2FA let you download a few (commonly 10) static codes that don’t change. If you anticipate a situation where you may lose connectivity access like this, it may make sense to download the codes and store them in a physical notebook.

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