When Things Go Wrong
Posted On: 2008-06-19
You know, one of the biggest problems in writing a column like this is the need to sound as positive as I can about whatever I happen to be writing about if it's something that affects your business. Of course there are often some very negative things that I need to write about but there are always positive alternatives or achievable outcomes so it's not so hard to focus on those.
But today I feel anything but positive as Steve and I face a problem that we just can't seem to solve. Oh I know that there are sure to be some positive outcomes that can be achieved but it's been one of those days when just about everything that could go wrong has ... and we're still finding more problems and as yet have no idea how to overcome them.
On Friday night it became necessary to update the version of PHP that was running on our server. No problem there, the guys at Phatservers did their usual good job of getting it all done for us. On Saturday though we began to see that a number of our blogs ... important money-earning blogs that get lots of traffic ... were a total mess. Posts were out of sequence on some while others were suddenly importing old posts.
The solution to that ... we were told ... was to upgrade all our WordPress blogs to the latest version 2.5.1 so we did, we upgraded every one of the blogs that were important for us and important for our clients. By Monday we didn't have a single category left in any of those major blogs ... not one.
Every single post in those blogs had become uncategorized and we couldn't get the control panel to show us any categories at all. We couldn't even add them back in because every time we tried WordPress told us that they already existed ... even though the script couldn't show them to us.
And we're not alone. A search of the help forums at WordPress.org gave us a number of threads from people who are having the same problem and the answers they got were ... total silence. None of them got an answer ... we couldn't find one single person who had been given a solution to the problem ... and it's a problem that has been around for a few weeks now.
Now I'm sure that we'll find a solution to the problem ... hopefully we'll simply be able to revert to an earlier version of WordPress, upload the most recent database backup that we took before we upgraded and get on with life ... but right now that's a distraction and a waste of time that we really didn't need.
And, like most of us would find in a situation like this, tempers have got a little frayed and we're both filtering what each other is saying through what each of us are thinking at the time and that means that sometimes we miss the point of what the other person is saying. That then leads to more fraying of tempers and of course you can see where this is all going.
So is that what happens at your place when things go wrong? It certainly is easy to let the problems take control of you and lapse into a rage or a panic isn't it? You might like to think that the old adage of 'When the going gets tough the tough get going' applies to you but the reality is often quite different isn't it?
I mean it's a wonderful saying, it suggests that if we're tough enough we can overcome the obstacles that are placed in front of us ... and of course we can ... but it's not a case of being tough. If you want to survive when the going gets tough it's a case of not panicking and not letting anger or even despair cloud your judgment for very long.
It's also a case of listening to what others are saying and not filtering it through your own thoughts or feelings because when you have those filters in place the message gets lost or distorted and you then waste more time and more angst until you suddenly realize that what has been said to you may not have been what you heard.
And sometimes overcoming those tough times means getting up and walking away from them. When you do that you may be delaying the solution but you could also be hastening it because when you come back to face the problem you've calmed down and perhaps you're going to see things a lot differently.
Of course everything I've said here is very easy to say when things are going well but when things go wrong ... when your latest project is going more and more pear-shaped by the second ... that's when your survival could easily depend on what you do and how you do it.
And as I've been writing this the problem has been solved. I would love to tell you what the solution was ... but I can't because I don't know. We thought that the guys at Phatservers had done something to correct the problem but they hadn't and they're just as mystified as we are. We simply don't know why but after four days of having no categories they're back on all the blogs and everything is working normally once more.