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Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Epiphany



Last night, just before nine o'clock, I was working on a web page and inserted a video that I had spent hours building on a photo website. It worked perfectly once, but the second time when I tried to preview it on the website, it wouldn't work. The code was there, but it disappeared when I tried to preview it. I struggled with it for an hour, gave up and went to bed. I agonized about it wondering what I did incorrectly. I woke up blaming myself for not knowing enough about the whole procedure to troubleshoot it. This morning, I thought of a half dozen possible reasons and tried to figure out the problem before calling tech support. I hate to give up in defeat and ask for help. My usual morning routine is to check on several websites and I discovered that two more videos from the same site were not working either. Did they expire? Was it being blocked somewhere in the process? Was there something new that the browser I was using had not updated to handle? I started checking other browsers. I work with three different browsers just to compare how each handles various applications. Was there a setting in any of the browsers that I had not managed correctly in order for this video to function correctly? But how would that explain the fact that it had worked correctly one time? Last thing I tried today was to go to the home of the video to check out the settings there. I found a message that the site would be unavailable from 9 p.m. yesterday to 9 a.m. today. The site had gone into hibernation, so to speak during the time I was working with it, but I didn't realize that at the time.

All that struggling to figure out what I had done wrong just to discover that I wasn't the problem. I hadn't done anything incorrectly. The problem existed elsewhere and would go away when the site had finished updating. What is it in some people that they are willing to take the blame when things go wrong and the last thing they consider is that they may not be the problem because the problem lies elsewhere? Even more interesting is why do some people never assume responsibility when things go wrong and blame everything or everyone other than themselves?

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