Editor’s note: This is the companion post to But I Still Love Technology-The Evens/Number Five, and, with their powers combined, form a complete version of The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story. If you haven’t read The Evens yet, you can do so here. For Number Five, click here.
Editor’s additional note: This countdown list is admittedly a bit meta–i.e. a blog post about adventures in blogging. As such, it may be of particular interest to those who are starting up a blog themselves. For the rest of the world, I hope that I’m not getting into the weeds so much that you can’t appreciate the stupidity/frustration/absurdity of these situations. Enjoy! (I’m hoping you do, at least.)
To reiterate what I’m up to:
In the process of getting the Point of the Story up and running, I’ve had a few, er, “technical difficulties” that should serve as a reminder that, while technology and automation can be pretty great, without proper human guidance they can lead to some real shit-shows/comedies of error.
And that–spoiler alert–is the point of this story. Let these serve as cautionary tales to those who dare put their social lives in the hands of a hand-less machine.
But I Still Love Technology-The Evens (2020)
Without further ado, I present to you:
The Top 5 Times Technology has Screwed Me Over at the Point of the Story.
#3: That time my blog thought it was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.
Back when this fiasco originally went down, I had shared some of it via the Point’s Instagram and Facebook pages, so this might sound familiar to some of you.
Over the summer, I had spent a couple of months putting the Point of the Story together before releasing it into the wild. One of the first things I needed to do was set the time zone for my server.
No problem! It was an easy decision to select Norfolk, thinking “Hey, perfect! That’s only a 3 hour drive from here!”
After that, the first order of business was to put up a “Coming Soon” page–replete even with a countdown timer–for anyone who tried to visit it before the Appointed Time Unto Which All Would Be Made Known.
And that Appointed Time, which all future historians will know by heart, was Thursday, August 29, 2019, precisely at 10 p.m. EDT.
When that day rolled around, and shortly before we went live, I had texted my good friend, known in these parts as “The Doctor,” and asked if he would test things out once the clock struck 10. You know, make sure all the links were functioning and that it wasn’t a general shit-show, etc., etc.
However, around that same time, when I tried going directly to a particular post from a different computer, I wasn’t seeing the “Coming Soon” screen as I had expected. So I pinged the good Doctor to check on it for me:
(Tries tweaking some settings, hoping to somehow get a different result…)
That last line there is an example of “careful what you wish for,” because that was one hope that was definitely fulfilled…apart from the Doctor’s testing, I don’t think I had a single visitor that first day. Womp-womp-womp!
Anyways, as you can tell, I had a prime suspect in mind as to what was causing my woes. Apparently I hadn’t caught on to the fact that the timezone menu was segregated by region:
So yeah, it turns out that there was another Norfolk–the Pacific kine, in fact. And apparently it’s living 16 hours in the future. No wonder the floodgates to the Point were opened early. The ----- thing is happily living its life under the delusion that it’s out in the middle of nowhere in the Pacific Ocean.
So, one would think that since I had a number one suspect in mind as to what was causing me yet another time-traveling woe, that I would be able remedy the problem lickity-split and go on my way. Right?
Of course I popped on over to my WordPress dashboard and set my server time to New York City. I figuratively dusted off my hands and said to myself, “Welp! Mission Accomplished! I made quick work of that pesky problem!”
Yet, to my dismay, I kept suffering from premature blog-post-jaculation. Without fail over the next 2 weeks, instead of being published on Sunday morning at 7:15 am, my latest posts would go out to the public at 3:15 pm on Saturday–whether they were in final form or not.
For the sake of those who would come after me, I feel it is of utmost importance–albeit boring–that I reveal just what the hell was going on with my server time, and how I finally fixed that bastard for good.
Eventually, eventually, eventually, after much pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth, I found the answer in the stupidest of places.
You see, there is very popular and powerful WordPress plugin called Jetpack that almost everyone uses. It’s got what every blogger/webmaster could ever need for basic site analytics, security, backups…and more!
Well, it turns out that for some reason, Jetpack also lets one set a server time, and who the ----- knows why it’s not automatically the same as what one sets in their WordPress dashboard.
In Summary, the wrong “common-sense” way to set your server time:
…and the correct elitist, No-You-Don’t-Know-What-You-Want-Let-Me-Fix-That-For-You, way to set your server time:1At least in the case where you’re using the otherwise useful Jetpack–made by the WordPress people themselves (hence why the setting is hiding at wordpress.com.
The point is beware of all the fancy “helpful” plugins you may be tempted to install. You never know which one of them asshats–ahem, I’m looking at you, Jetpack–might be a control freak, overriding your settings and then hiding the One True Setting in some obscure place.
And now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for…
#1: That time I tried to solicit an erotic photographer on Facebook.
So far, the dumb predicaments that errant technology has put me in have been without much real-world consequence. However, there has been one glaring exception to that rule.
A while back I told a tale of attempting to land a Craigslist gig of debugging a treasure hunt, as recounted in Blog Like Nobody’s Reading.
For those of you have read it–and those of you who just now hopped on over there to read it–you may recall the bonus story I just could not resist including.
In it I shared the tragic tale of some poor chap who had a perpetual Craigslist ad in the Gigs section, who for the life of him could not find someone to take erotic photographs of him at the behest of his wife.
You know, nothing fancy, just something low-key and tasteful like this:
And since I know you’re all dying for an update on his status, I came across his ad AGAIN just a few days go, meaning that he has been critically under-erotically-photographed for at least 7 months now.
It’s somehow one of the saddest yet most hilarious things I’ve personally witnessed on Craigslist. So of course I couldn’t deprive the rest of the world of the chuckles to be found upon reflecting on his situation.
But as I’ve already well established, Karma is one bad-ass beach and pity anyone who should provoke her justice.
Things started to go sideways for me when I first had the idea to even include this beautiful vignette. Originally, in an early draft of the post, I had rudely interrupted myself in the middle of the main story and dropped it right in there. You know, train-wreck-of-thought/stream-of-consciousness and all that jazz.
And of course I had to include the critical piece of evidence, a screenshot of the ad. Again, to be clear, this is NOT my ad, NOT my words, NOT my marriage that is hinging on some tasteful male erotica:
Although later I would move that story to a bonus addendum at the end of the post, I had set the post up to be published while it was still in its first draft form, in case I didn’t have the chance to go back and revise it before my self-imposed deadline. So at the time, this screenshot was the first picture in the post, a detail that would come back to haunt my lily-white ass later on.
A neat feature on WordPress is that you can connect your social media accounts–Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, etc.–and have an announcement go out on those platforms concurrently with your blog post when you have it scheduled to be published at a certain time (as I regularly do):
Automation sure is great, isn’t it? Thanks, Technology! Because of you, I don’t have to wake up at 7:15 on Sunday mornings and hop frantically from WordPress to Facebook to Twitter just to blast out my latest liturgical3I’m pretty certain that that does not mean what I’m trying to make it mean, but just don’t have it in me to do 5 second of internet research. offering.
If I recall correctly, I stayed up until around 3 in the morning the Saturday night/Sunday morning before Blog Like Nobody’s Reading was set to be published, indubitably trying to get it ready to be unveiled to the world, as is par for the course around here.
And thanks to all the publishing bells and whistles WordPress offers, I could get some much needed rest and sleep in late, knowing that all would be shared at the appointed time without any need for further human intervention.
It wasn’t until around noon that Sunday before I decided to check in on my Facebook post to see if was getting much action from my followers.
To my dismay, this is what I found being planted in their Facebook feeds:
Did ever express to you my insistence that context matters matters matters? If not: click here or here.
And now how meta is it that we have ourselves a real-live example of its importance, in the flesh!
Not only did stupid WordPress/Facebook decide to grab the first image from the first draft, but it decided to nicely crop it such that, even if you happened to notice the link and preview at the bottom of the picture, it sure looks like I’m straight-up pleading with everyone I know on Facebook to please, please, PLEASE, oh please take some nudie pics of me.
After this, this will be the image of me burned forever in their minds:
*Face-palm-emoji*
Although, I’m not sure whether I’m relieved or disappointed that no one took me up on my offer…
Anyways, as you can imagine, I immediately tried to edit it and change the picture, but you wouldn’t believe how unimaginably impossible that was. After 30 bonus minutes of that inaccurate solicitation continuing to pepper people’s Facebook feeds, I finally had to give up and just delete it, and post a new one altogether.
The lesson I learned here is trust nobody: if you want to embarrass yourself right, you’re going to have to do it yourself.
And that is also why you always see some poorly cut-and-pasted image with my Big Lip logo plastered on it accompanying ever ----- post I publish. No matter how tangentially related to the story, I always make some picture to be set as my Featured Image (another WordPress setting–I’ll spare you the screenshot for now), that way I know exactly what will be showing up in people’s Facebook and Twitter feeds.
After all, I have a meticulously manicured public image to maintain…
Content created on: 4/6/10/11 January 2020 (Saturday/Monday/Friday/Saturday)
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