There’s an old joke that has been told many different times and in different manners, but it ultimately winds up at the punchline of, “When you’re up to your ass in alligators, it’s hard to remember the original mission was to drain the swamp.”
Basically, it’s the situation where you started off planning to do one (simple) thing, but for a variety of reasons – all of which are beyond your control – lots of other stuff intrudes, either because the task was a lot more complicated than you thought it would be, or because there’s hurdles and obstacles being tossed at you along the way. [“I just wanted to take a quick boat trip to Troy to visit some friends. Why the *&(# am I dealing with sirens trying to lure me to my death?”]
I ran into one of those just a few minutes ago. I had edited / updated another chapter of the book last night, but I’d forgotten to get “Project Statistics” (to tell me my current word-count). I keep all of my writing files on a home network storage device (sometimes known as a “NAS” – Networked Attached Storage – or also a “personal cloud”). This way, no matter which computer I use for writing, I’m still working on the same files and don’t have to worry about copying things back and forth or any other silliness.
So, just now – I was at my non-laptop computer – and was getting ready to access the manuscript. Except … this computer isn’t sync-ing files with the NAS. “Uh-oh… wtf is going on?”
A few minutes of investigation later and I discover that the software package to do this has been “EOL” (End-of-Lifetime)’ed. And it didn’t bother telling me that it was going to spontaneously stop working. Lovely. Now I have to go find what is being used to replace it. [Trust me – in this situation, there’s always a replacement. I mean – “shared files” is pretty much the main reason to have a NAS. So, job #1 isn’t something that’s going to be casually discarded.]
Yep, there’s a new version of the software – and it also requires a new software package on the NAS. Start loading that in … wait forever and a day for it to install because the NAS is extremely low-powered and runs slower than a molasses-flavored CPU trying to count to 10. Also install the new version of the client package… Tweak settings to get them all playing well together (again)…
And … about 40 minutes after I just wanted to see how many words I’m up to!!! I finally am able to open Scrivener on the other computer and get the right number.
sigh … isn’t technology just wonderful?
