When I came home from work today, as I staggered in the door escaping the 100°+ heat and was met by the cat who must be greeted immediately or Bad Things Happen, the housemate called from her room, “Oh! You’re home. I…had intended to do the thing today.” She said this because I had asked her to do the thing today, as I reluctantly trudged out the door to work nine hours before. “I had the best of intentions!” she assured me.
I laughed and asked, “What’s the name of that place, you know, the road is paved with intentions, but I forget…?” and we laughed and I went off to my room and sat down to do the thing that I’m supposed to do tonight at the latest–write a blog post for Turtleduck Press.
And that, dear friends, is where my own intentions went astray, because instead of landing on Turtleduck Press, I got a 500 error.
Well, blast.
I’m not the girl who runs straight to tech support. I know my way around a cpanel, at least more than some. So off I went, looking for advice.
Hadn’t touched any permissions or the .htaccess, not blinking likely too many processes were running but I checked anyway, error log blank (really?), so off I went to tech support after all. And as I sat waiting for the lovely tech support person* in the chat to check all the things I already checked, I jotted some notes about the blog post I was still going to need when/if the site came back. Are you surprised my thoughts were on the unreliability of technology?
Tech support types will tell you that computers only do what you tell them to do. Garbage in, garbage out, the saying goes, and if your computer messes up, it’s all a human’s fault somewhere down the line.
I call horse pucky.
For instance–
Years ago when my wrists hurt heading into NaNo, I taught myself Dvorak. Since then, I’ve switched every single computer I use to Dvorak. Some time ago, I had three computers running Windows 7 that I regularly logged into–work, personal desktop, personal laptop. All logged in already, but locked. Two would log me in with Dvorak, but one made me hunt and peck my password in QWERTY. “Ah,” you say, “but it was Windows 7 Professional and Home Premium! That is the difference!”
Not quite. It was the work computer (Professional) and the laptop (Home Premium) that would let me log back in with Dvorak. The desktop (Home Premium)? No way, José.
Another example–I use Outlook for all my email at work. It’s what my work provides, and I find it way handier than many things anyway. I like to use it as a simple-to-use filing system. Oh, HR says I didn’t send them the thing? Let me just search real quick, then I’ll forward them the original email. (Do I sound smug? I’m not like that normally, but with some of the people in HR, I keep a copy of every single thing I do, and send it each time they claim I didn’t send it, with a chirpy “oh, oops, wonder if the server ate it on the way to you?” because all tech support are lovely people and HR never loses things. Trust me.)
Anyway. Sometimes Outlook just will not find the email I’m searching for. Recently I was looking for my annual review from 2015. I searched “annual” and “review.” I also searched “eval” and “employee” and “p3” which is the form that goes with the review if there’s any change in pay or schedule or anything. Nothing.
Hey, 2015 was a long time ago. I went to my archived folders, searched all my terms again. Nothing. Then I searched “office manager” and up popped an email with the subject line “Annual Review” and the words “office manager” appearing nowhere in the email but inside the Word document attached. Right next to the document labeled “82015 p3.”
Just like anything else, technology can really be a jerk, and it doesn’t need a reason. But at least it doesn’t (knock on wood) treat me as badly as it does a friend of mine. She was working on her master’s thesis when a bolt of lightning hit the house. She’d saved the document many times–but when she finally got her computer turned back on, it wasn’t where she left it. Somehow a paragraph here, a page there, and here a sentence–it was saved in a number of her other files.
Can you imagine? I think I would have run screaming into the wilderness to live out my life in a cave, myself.
*all tech support people are lovely. Trust me.