Murphy’s Law In Effect.

“Whatever can go wrong, will go wrong.”

That about sums up these last two weeks at work so far. Besides dealing with last week’s stupid crisis with the replacement designer, I had another one of the projects I was working on go into stupidity mode yesterday. After postponing the launch on Monday, I didn’t hear much on Tuesday. At 6:00 p.m., I get confirmation that the final content is coming my way, and the person who’s in charge of the project leaves to go on vacation for a week, leaving Point of Contact #2 in charge. At 6:30, I actually get final content, which requires a bit of back and forth with the flash programmer. PoC2 has to go home, because he rode his bike and has to leave before it gets dark, giving me his cell phone number.

At about 7:00, after messing with the content, I realize that it’s all working except for the most important part, and try to call PoC2 on his cell phone, which goes straight to voice mail. So, I call Point of Contact #3, who tells me not to go with new version, because it’s pointless without main feature. So, I go back and forth with Flash Designer to try and figure it out, but Flash is notorious for not giving any sort of error feedback, so we don’t get anywhere. To make things even more “interesting”, DNS starts going wonky as we’re trying to test, so it makes debugging difficult, as we don’t know if the connection isn’t occurring because of some problem on our end, or the domain name just isn’t resolving.

At 8:00 I say I need to leave, because I already bought tickets for 9:00 showing of T3… if I hadn’t been going to the movie, I likely would have been at work for a while. So, they have to delay the ads…

This morning, amidst voice mails, telephone static issues, more DNS hiccups, and more miscommunication, we finally get the thing fixed and pushed out.

The moral of this story is: Don’t give content to the engineer three hours before something is supposed to go live, especially if there’s new technology involved.