10:06 am on Wednesday, July 11th, 2012 – sun’s up, grass is green, street is quiet and and I’m excited.
I posted last night, then left the site, all ready to put the name in at the top of the URL line to read what I’d written, to find it like any other reader. I put in the site’s name, created only moments earlier. I clicked GO.
All that came back on the screen was ‘this page cannot be found’, with a bullet- point list of suggestions to try and rectify the situation. My stomach dropped. The bugs scampering across the monitor and I looked for the obvious reasons. Did I misspell? Did I forget a precious ‘dot’ or a ‘com’? Everything was in its place. I clicked on the reload button. Same answer. Now I feared what I’d ‘published’ was gone, or worse, it was there, but my finding it had the same chance as finding a specific single book in the New York City Public Library on 5th and 42nd, if the books were all just piled on the floor. Then I realized my analogy was far too limited…this is the internet! The boundless space of the universe.
I deleted my entry. Try again. I typed with only my right index finger, pressing firmly on every key. Yeah, that would make a difference. I hit GO. ‘this page cannot be found’. My urge was to administer the method those of my age found useful whenever dealing with a piece of machinery or anything else technical in nature – give it a rap on its side. It always worked on my Remington Selectric typewriter, when the whirling sound inside was a motor that energized the little ball full of characters, that slammed with a machine gun report across the ribbon, which transferred ink to the paper. Biggest problem I’d ever encountered with that was when the letters on the ball clogged with ink; the ‘e’ and ‘o’ just became large glob-like dots on the white parchment. But the computer’s hum was just the fan, and it was running.
Did I screw up when I created the blog in the first place? I went back to the beginning and started to go through the entire procedure of putting in the names, passwords. Flashes of red messages popped up under my entries: ‘this name already exists’. Of course it does, I made it only a few minutes ago! I looked for that spot on the page that would tell me how to find what already was. No luck.
It was late, I was tired, the coffee’s caffeine rush had worn off long before. I resigned to the fact that nothing was happening and I’d check with my computer-literate daughter in the morning. Get some sleep, all would look better in the daylight. And here I am. We put in the blog name and clicked. The blog showed up, the words were found. I guess the internet had to sleep on it too….
The story begins on Monday, July 16th. Enough time for me to figure out a working title.
courtesyprotectrespect 