Now I know people don't give a shit what I say, but I kinda need to vent and get my thoughts down on paper....Er....You know what I mean.

So as of I want to say Oct. 24th, 25th? I no longer have access to my Telegram account. A forced update by Win10 caused pretty much all my saved account info to be wiped across the board. Fuck you Microsoft -cough- Now this normally isn't an issue, because most sites and platforms let you choose your password, an email to get recovery options....Telegram is different.

For those who don't know, Telegram is basically like Skype or Discord but with better features. It has stickers, you can make groups, you can get calls that don't shit themselves like the other two platforms-- It's designed to be a messaging platform. Great, it does that well. Here's the catch. You need to put in a phone number to make an account. And you don't need to-- or in some cases don't have the option to-- put in an email address. It's just that phone number.

Now for some, that's a bit much. They worry about people stealing their phone number or being cold called by people because they got it. They claim it's safe, but it's really not as I'm finding out, and we'll get onto that in a bit. The problem I'm having though is I don't have the same phone number I had when I made the account. I made it over two years ago, and I never gave a fuck about my phone number, because nothing has ever said 'you need the same number for this to function.' Well Telegram does. Because to access your account, you need to get a Text Message/SMS with a code to unlock the account. And that's where this all started: I had to somehow figure out which phone number was tied to the account, and get a message from it to gain access to my account.

Now, I got the phone number, but clearly I can't get the message. For reference, the phone that it's tied to got crushed under the wheel of a bus. It Physically no longer exists. So I tried reaching out to Telegram support. Now hold on to your seats and don't jump up with questions you'll be able to ask at the end. There are two flavors of telegram support. 'Ask a Question', which is built into Telegram, and a 'Telegram Support' web page. The Ask a Question can only be accessed while logged into an account. Thus it's useless for account recovery. The Web Page has an even worse setup. You have to type out a question and all that, but then you have to put in an email and phone number tied to an account. The phone number is whatever at this point, but remember I said you can make an account without an email? Yeah, here's the brilliant thing: If you don't put in BOTH a valid email and number, the support ticket gets deleted. Great customer service.

So my next thought of course is go find the forums and ask-- There are no forums. The closest thing is a Reddit, where if you ask for help you either have the topic deleted, or have a volunteer tell you 'this sub reddit is not for support.' Okay, what is the subreddit for support. 'Discord or Twitter.' No, I'm not joking, they just said that their main support 'forum' is Twitter, where you have a 100 character limit and no visibility, or Discord, the platform they're competing with. It's like that joke about Bing, and how you'd have to Google it to know what Bing is.

So fast forward a whole day and a half. I haven't received any feedback from Telegram support, I'm still locked out of my account, and after saying 'fuck it I'll make a new account' I find out that you can't. Not without getting a new device. Why? Oh the account you can't gain access to, yeah it's still logged in, and you can't have two accounts logged in at the same time. So until I get my original account back I can't use Telegram on my PC. So I'm pissed, clearly, and I'm trying to reach out to everyone....And it turns out that I'm not the only one with this issue. Pretty much most the people I know on Telegram PC-- 9 for every 10 basically-- had the same thing happen; Forced update, passwords wiped, all that. Some of them still had their phones and could get the message. Like me however, the rest didn't hang on to their phone or SIM card from however many years ago. And they're pretty much in the same bind. None of them know about the problem with support, or anything I mentioned above, and when I did it was like watching despair in motion.

So now we're at the point where we're trying to get Telegram's attention-- not easy-- through twitter-- even less easy-- and finding alternative solutions. As someone who isn't a volunteer pointed out on Reddit, if you're not logged into more than one device with Telegram, you're basically locked out until you get the number. So the options are

Call your Cell carrier to ask for your old phone number, and hope it's not in use.
Switch out the SIM card if you have it
Or hack your own account.

And ironically, the last option as absurd as it sounds is the most viable it seems. I haven't done it yet, mainly because I don't want to invite misfortune over a chat platform, but it's pretty simple to spoof your phone number to basically reroute text messages and calls to where ever you want. So much for Telegram being secure....

So that's where we're at. Telegram basally locks you out from using the platform if you don't hang on to the phone you make it with, and their customer support doesn't exist if you're not on Telegram. That's pretty absurd considering how often people change their phones and phone numbers. And I don't know anyone who keeps their same phone number either. Maybe that's just me. But more or less, don't use Telegram. I know it's great, it's fun, and it has stickers, but I'm steadily finding out more and more ways that you can just be locked out of your account, even if you do have your phone, and....I can't help but shake my head.