Keeping Perspective

by Karen McCullough

I’ve run my own web design and development business for the past twelve years, ever since I left the corporate world. It’s been a great ride. Most of my clients have turned into friends and I’ve enjoyed working with them to try to make their sites the best possible for them. I’m now in the process of retiring, due to my age, my husband’s retirement last year, and the fact that I’m traveling more to visit my far-flung family.

But I do still work with my existing clients and have told them that I plan to continue for as long as I’m mentally and physically able.  For the most part it’s a pretty low-key job. My clients send requests and I get them done as quickly as I can.

This past week, though, I had one of those issues that stretch my patience with the job. Or not so much the job as some of the services I have to work with. In this case it was the hosting service for my client.

The client has a Wordpress site I customized for her a while back. She’s done a great job of managing the site on her own, but a couple of weeks ago, a gremlin hit (probably during an attempt to upgrade the Wordpress software) and it brought her site down.

I tend to be compulsive about keeping things running smoothly so I went to work on fixing the problem. And quickly discovered it was going to be a slog. I played whack-a-mole with the errors – fixed one and two more popped up. I finally decided the best option was to restore the site from a recent backup.

Neither I nor the clients had one. I had an old backup from when I did some renovations on the site, but using it would mean losing a lot of data. The clients didn’t have any backups, presuming the hosting service would have them. Most do.

This one didn’t. Or at least claimed they didn’t because that’s a service for which they charge extra.  I called BS on that. They finally admitted they did have backups (of course they did!) but would charge for restoring it. And they wouldn’t restore the site as it was, just dump the files into a backup directory.

It’s an a*****le move from an a******le hosting service.  I’m not listing the name but you can email me for it.  It’s a name you’d recognize.

Anyway, those backup files did provide what I needed to get the site up and running again. The whole thing cost my poor clients a LOT more than it should have to restore their site.

But what I really want to focus on is something one of the clients said to me in a phone conversation as we discussed options for restoring the site. “It’s just a website. No one dies if this website goes down. And if we have to rebuild it from scratch, we can do that.”

It was a wake-up call I needed.  I get so compulsive that I lose site of the bigger picture. Except for some critical services provided on the web, most sites are not really a big deal in the overall scheme of things.  That’s something I need to remember.

I had a similar experience on the writing front recently. I’m in a great anthology called Carolina Crimes: 21Tales of Need, Greed and Dirty Deeds . My story is called "Dead Man’s Hand."

I like the story a lot and I’m proud of it, but it went to press with an error. One that is big and obvious and stupid.  I’m not sure how it got past both me and the editor, but it did and it’s there in black and white. I was completely chagrinned when I realized it.

I was relating this story to another author at the recent Killer Nashville conference.

She asked, “Does it ruin the story?”

I had to admit it didn’t. It didn’t impact the plot at all.

She said, “Don’t worry about it then. Half the readers won’t even notice and the half that do will just shrug and wonder how that got by the editor. It won’t ruin the story for them.”

And you know what? She’s right. That error looks so huge to me, but the first few people who read the story and talked to me about it split pretty evenly between those who didn’t even notice and those who wondered about the question. They all said they still enjoyed the story.

Perspective. It’s a hard thing to keep in mind, but so necessary!

Perspective

One of the jingles I remember from my children's Sesame Street years is about artistic perspective: "That's about the size. Where you put your eyes. That's about the size of it." The lesson on perspective, in much more than the artistic sense, is one I must relearn frequently.

Take, for instance, last Sunday evening. We were on our way to the nearby town of Oroville, headed to a son's birthday dinner, when we received a message. Our county sheriff had ordered the evacuation of Oroville due to the "expected failure" of a spillway on the nation's tallest dam. Almost immediately, the traffic going the opposite direction went from sparse to heavy to bumper-to-bumper as people fled the city where we were headed on their way to the city we had just left. Uhhh...?

Phone calls and text messaging moved the dinner from one son's home below the dam to the home of another son above the lake. Then the traffic slowed in our direction as we joined others heading into the foothills.

But back to perspective.

As a reporter for the local newspaper, my hubby had covered the Department of Water Resources (DWR). He knew the dam inside and out, quite literally, and understood what the risks were and weren't. Like most other drivers, we stayed calm, maintaining normal traffic patterns and even letting others into the lane in front of us.

Not so with the folks who panicked. As we drove east, a car whizzed up the fog line on our right, going west at about twice the speed limit, backing up down the shoulder. Another car flew by on our left, possibly going as fast as eighty m.p.h. on a city street, dodging cars from both directions in the center turn lane. Those were only two of the people who behaved foolishly, even dangerously.

An old joke says you know it will be a bad day when you turn on the news to see evacuation routes out of your city. It isn't a joke when it happens. Keeping perspective in mind, we took a back-door route to go home that evening only to find the national news showing images we had just seen along the way. I promise we weren't laughing, but we weren't panicked either.

Most of a week has passed. So far the spillway has held, the lake level is down, the evacuation order has been lifted, and things are back to what passes for normal. The only big difference for us has been a "sleep-over" with the three cute grandbabies in our downstream son's family. Although about 188,000 people are still under an evacuation warning, we're no longer in the national headlines and it looks like the greatest risks may be behind us.

So far the only people who have been injured were those who lost perspective, the folks who panicked and caused mash-ups along the evacuation routes. The lack of perspective on the part of the DWR is a matter for the politicians to unravel.


Susan Aylworth is the author of 14 novels, all available as e-books. She loves her northern California home which she shares with her husband of 46 years and the two spoiled cats they serve. When she can't be with her seven children, seven great kids-in-law, and 25 grandbabies, she loves hanging with her fictional offspring, the children of her mind. She also loves hearing from readers. Visit her website at www.susanaylworth.com or find her @SusanAylworth, at .facebook.com/Susan.Aylworth.Author, or on Pinterest.