On the Way Out
Timeline:
Wednesday:
10:30 – Talk with Dean, decide that if there’s no solution by the end of the day, we’ll switch servers.
12:30 – Go to lunch, casually discuss server issues with dean.
12:40 – Vice president involves self in discussion, acts like a real asshole.
12:45 – Seriously consider leaving
2:00 – Dean apologizes for Vice President, apparently that’s just the way he treats people.
2:10 – We tell Dean that if we don’t have a working server by 4:00, we need to switch, she agrees.
4:00 – Dean signs up for Lunarpages account.
Thursday:
9:30 – Come into office, no e-mails regarding Lunarpages account have been forwarded to me.
10:00 – Dean comes in and says that they’ve decided that they don’t want to switch servers after all.
11:00 – Roll out of the parking lot, and head north out of Kingsville.
For a week, the dean of the school had been saying that if we couldn’t resolve the issues with their web host “soon”, we would switch to my recommended service of Lunarpages. The cost was minimal, $100 per year.
After being spontaneously treated like crap by the Vice President at lunch on Wednesday afternoon, I told the dean of the school that we needed to have a solution for the web host by the end of the day.
At 4 o’clock, as expected the issues were not resolved. So I went into her office and said that it was time to switch to a new server.
She agreed (we’d been there waiting for them for two weeks after all), and she signed up for a Lunarpages account (shameless plug).
It takes a couple of hours for the order to go through, so when I came in Thursday morning, I was ready to get started.
What do you know? The e-mails from Lunarpages hadn’t been forwarded to me. So I waited and began to post “The Veil of the Institution”.
She came in an hour later and said that she had talked with the president of the school again, and they had decided that they did not wish to switch web hosts after all.
After talking with them on day 1 and determining their needs, there I was with a program in tow to set up an interface so that they could easily create and destroy pages, simply by pasting their word document or whatever into a form.
She asked if I could just manually create whatever ridiculous number of pages for the website instead, since there was no chance that they were going to get their web host to accept the program.
I very nicely told her that no, based on what their needs were two weeks ago we had decided together to take this route, and that if she had said that was what they wanted in the beginning we could have done that. I told her that at this point, I was not willing to sit here for another two weeks manually creating pages simply because they were unwilling to switch to a server that could accommodate our technical needs.
She said that she understood, and asked if they could have the template I had created on the first day we arrived. Of course they could.
So I e-mailed them the code, and we were on our way. That was that.
It sucked because we didn’t get a chance to say goodbye to any of the kids, but this is the life we choose.
It was disappointing when they decided not to follow through with the web host switch. Several times they told me that they would switch servers if they couldn’t resolve the issues or get adequate tech support by this day or that day. We’re talking about $100 here, and they were going to get a free website.
Well, it’s their call. So now we’re back on the road headed to El Paso against all sound advice.
As I write this we’re traveling west on Interstate 10 through the hilly Texas desert. Windmills line the tops of the cliffs out the passenger side window.
As usual, I’m imagining dinosaurs.