Hey everyone,
I’m feeling pretty junky this evening (morning now) and since my guts were making it hard to sleep I thought I’d take a crack at fixing my blog site which I just realized was broken-ish for about 7 weeks now … how the time flies …
Well you’re seeing this post, so long story short, I fixed it. Basically IE users were out of luck. I’m still not sure what happened, but it all started with a failed server cluster at my hosting provider back in February. They claimed (accurately I know see) that they fixed everything on their end, but my blog site never recovered.
About 45 minutes into a very difficult, slow progressing, web-chat conversation with a Ukrainian tech support agent who chatted with better english grammar and spelling than me, a light bulb popped on and I was reminded of some very old very complex DNS learning I went through back in the day. I realized that even though the tech wasn’t exactly right technically (an important position to take for an engineer like me who’s never wrong about tech stuff…), that I myself was not as right as I could have been (an important phrase for anyone who’s never wrong to have in their repertoire).
Basically I was barking up a tree that was not the tree I should have been barking up, not the wrong tree mind you … just a different one. I politely excused myself from the chat, thanked the tech for his patience (no need to ruin his evening), and started digging elsewhere. 15 minutes later I was up and running again.
The experience reminded me that it is very easy to become stubborn about an issue when things aren’t working the way one wishes, and people aren’t telling one what one wants to hear. As a 13-14ish year veteran in supporting end users in some form of technical capacity, I can certainly appreciate what it’s like to work with the “tough” ones like I was being tonight (this morning). Though this particular tech didn’t have an actual answer, I wasn’t listening to everything he was saying, and missed out on the information I eventually used to stop pursuing a ghost.
I thought I’d put this stream-of-thought in black and white, to remind myself that although I may never be wrong … that doesn’t always mean I’m right. =)
