I spent close to a year worrying my way through some technical aspects of web design just so I could make my own life easier, especially when it came to managing a live horoscope, automatically delivered, every Wednesday night at midnight. Didn’t want it to interfere with the rest of my carefully crafted lifestyle.
And it’s been several years now since I have had a fateful failure. Out of concern, I try to make sure I’m by a computer screen at midnight because, to be truthful, I never do trust these infernal machines that much. Just to check up.
I was quietly reclined Wednesday night, noticed that the scopes should’ve rolled over, so I got my self up from the futon, and logged back on. Remember dial-up connections? Yeah, like that.
Oops, no scopes. Two e-mails. One was a paid client, nice note and an apology, “Tech issues, we’re working on it.”
But then there were two more, check that time stamp: “12:10 AM” – and the tone of the complaint, too. When all I see is text, I can only judge by what the text message is.
I did a quick bit of work in a slow text editor, and fashioned up a late night work around that wasn’t terribly elegant. But it worked. Then Thursday night, I was supposed to meet a computer client, but I also knew that I needed to be clear-headed and clear thinking to sort through some of the problem and affect a good fix. We put off the meeting for another evening.
Nicknamed the temporary fix “kluge” because that’s exactly what it is. Really basic layout tricks, nothing fancy. But the page size bloated from a handful kilobytes to over 70. Load time blossomed, too.
It’s a temporary work around until I get my main system back on line.
But it did bring up that thought again, some way, if I could just make a dollar for every adamant reader, this sort of issue wouldn’t be an issue.
To be honest, I think I should get two bucks for every strident, demanding oftentimes demeaning message. But maybe that’s just me.
Thinking about it, when I ask a service person what his or her birthday is, I usually tip a little bit better, just for my intrusion, for humoring me.
Which goes back to the larger question of passing up on making some big bucks doing computer work for a client, plus getting a decent meal out of the deal, probably BBQ, and skipping all that, just so I throw together a quick, inelegant “kluge”?