After doing a little math and realizing the time it would take to call over 300 businesses and organizations, I decided it might be time for a little bit of help. I tossed up an ad on craigslist describing exactly what we were doing. Someone to help with all of these phone calls.
Having about as much experience in massive data recovery as I do with interview, I met with a few people and just followed my gut. Peter M., the first official employee of the point2point empire joined my ranks. I paid for a Vonage landline with a 504 phone number to make the recovery process easier and we started calling all of the people.
Eight hours a day, five days a week, we left voicemails. We got cussed at because people thought we were a scam of some kind. Hangups, more cursing, more voicemails.
It was a coin toss every time we called someone. When calling they were either thankful and happy to hear from us or angry because they thought we were the ones who abandoned them. I often referred to the helicopters during Karina rescuing people from their roofs. Stop shooting at us, we’re just trying to get your 57site and email up and running.
Very early on I decided that I was going to simply honor the former host’s pricing for domain renewal and hosting. I took most people at their word and honestly never gave it a second thought.
Luckily when we changed the contact information on all 300 domains, it gave is a bit of validity. A lot of “I don’t know who you are but my son in law’s boyfriend who knows how to do a WHOIS lookup said you own it so whatever you want, sir”.
We continued alphabetically, which seems like the only fair way to process a list. This is one of my biggest regrets is that I should have figured out from this list were the people I should call first and who can be triaged in time.
To this day I still look at the list of names and go “Should have called them first, should have called them second” but you know what they say about hindsight.