My mom emailed me complaining about getting the following error when logging into her Google Calendar:

Oops.  Another calendar has been created for cams.mom@moms-isp.net (not her real address).
Each calendar needs its own email address so friends can send you invitations.

My mom couldn't figure out what this error meant or why she was getting it.  She'd been using Google Calendar for over a year, using the Google account she created with her ISP-provided email address as a login.  And she even contacted her ISP (Wild Blue satellite Internet) at one point, who had no idea what she was talking about.

So I took a look, and I pretty quickly managed to figure out what the problem was.

Her ISP decided to provide Google Apps for Domains for their customers.  They just created user accounts in Google Apps for all of their customersone weekend.  As a result, there were two Google accounts with cams.mom@moms-isp.net as their login - One that was a standard, run-of-the-mill Google account with access to Calendar, Docs, etc., and one that was the domain-specific login to Google Apps.

So the only way she could resolve this was change to a different email address as her login for her standard Google account.  Not a huge deal, since she has a couple different email accounts, but definitely an inconvenience. 

Still, I have two issues with this:

1. Was this scenario not anticipated by Google?  Why not work around it?  Why not merge her old, "standard" calendar into her new, domain-specific calendar?  For what it's worth, that's why I haven't migrated from my Google account to Google Apps for Domains.  I'd love to have my own camthegeek.com Google Apps, but it'd be an all-out migration for my Gmail, Google Talk, and Google Calendar.  Why can't they just tie my Gmail and camthegeek.com addresses together as some sort of alias, so if I'm logged in to Google Calendar as me@gmail, I'm also logged in as me@camthegeek?  That way my friends wouldn't have to change their Google Talk settings to keep in touch with me, and I wouldn't have to migrate my Gmail and Calendar.
   
   
2. What the hell is wrong with Wild Blue that they couldn't train their tech support to anticipate this and properly guide their customers through it?  I understand the allure of Google Apps.  If I were an ISP, I'd put my customers on it.  It's a major value-add.  But in their pre-migration activities, did they really not anticipate that, out of their thousands of customers, one of them might possibly have endeavored to create a Google account with their wildblue.net email address?  Give me a break.