Thursday 23 Feb 2023: Technology fail… again

Image by Yatheesh Gowda from Pixabay

On Tuesday morning, after working through the entire night, I submitted the fourth instalment of the ghostwriting at around 8am. As I mentioned yesterday, as the poet was getting up, I was going to bed. But I must have had some sort of premonition because I got out of bed again, switched the computer on and checked that the file had sent. It hadn’t, so I sent it again, and I sat and waited until it went. Once it was gone, I went back to bed again and slept solidly for a good few hours.

Due to this, I was a complete and utter waste of space on Tuesday, and I got up late on Wednesday too, still catching up on sleep from the Monday night marathon.

I wasn’t very well yesterday morning. I don’t know if it was working through the night on Monday, the stress of losing and finding the cat, a bug I picked up at the weekend when we went to visit my mom, or a combination of all three. Fortunately it was only short-lived, but the poet picked it up as well a little, which suggests the latter as the home where she lives has been closed to visitors this week due to sickness and diarrhoea. My mom doesn’t have it, but my mom has the constitution of a rhinoceros. 

When I reached my desk, I pottered around, doing a few diary things and thinking about the bonus short story I still had to finish for the ghostwriting client. I had to nip to Meadowhall to get thank you gifts for the people who found the cat (they didn’t want the reward), some tins of sardines for the cat lady (who also didn’t want the reward), and birthday gifts for the granddaughter. We were going to take the granddaughter’s gifts over, but her and her mum had just gone out, so they said they’d come to us instead.

I was working away on the bonus short story when they arrived, so I broke away from work again and we had half an hour with them. Back at my desk again, I finished the bonus short story and I submitted it… and then I saw a message from the client saying that Part 4 hadn’t arrived yet…

What? I’d worked all through the night on Monday, sent it twice Tuesday morning before going to bed, and it hadn’t arrived? I didn’t even receive an email alerting me to the message asking where it was, but there it all was in the message history. The instalment simply hadn’t sent.

Technology, eh?

So I sent it again and sent a separate note asking the client to confirm that he’d received both the final instalment and the bonus short story.

Once I’d done that I very, very quickly rustled up something for the 12 Stories in 12 Months and posted that at about 10:30pm Wednesday night. We have until 8am the following day, South Africa time, which is about 6am UK time.

And that was all I managed yesterday. I updated the diary again, had a bit of a faff, and turned everything off, glad that Wednesday’s late night wasn’t anywhere near as bad as Monday’s late night.

I still have catch-up work to do today, but the poet has band practice tonight so that will give me another couple of hours at least.


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