A hugely inconvenient Google Accounts Bug

Friday, I felt the need to share a Google Spreadsheet with my wife. Based on the information that I had, it appeared that Google spreadsheets were only available to those with a gmail account, so I sent my wife a gmail invitation. She clicked the link from her invite and went through the registration process, but, since my Google Account was apparently logged in, my base account email address (a non-google domain) was changed to a gmail.com address. Well folks it got ugly from here. Now, many of the services that I use on a daily basis were linked to the same Account but with my wife's new email address as the login.

I sent an email to the Google Accounts support team requesting that they change my email back. Nope they said. I would have to create another Google account with my desired email address (the original one) and then re-link all my services to that. This was fine for adwords....there is a handy re-linking process under account prefs, but this feature does not exist for Google Calendar or Google Spreadsheets. Fortunately, it looks like adsense stands apart from the Google Master Account.

I admire Google for the most part. Right now, however, I am pissed off. They have a bug which allows a user to change their account to a gmail.com domain but does not allow me to change it back to a non-gmail.com domain. GRRR.