Subtle Little Lessons

Last week, I was certain that the new Tech EdVentures web site was ready to launch.  I had worked for nearly six days non-stop drafting style sheets, tweaking graphic elements that my designer had created.  In preview mode, it looked awesome.  It looked invincible.  Even more importantly, it looked like I would finally be able to start advertising!  Think again.  

I opened the graphical page editor that Go Daddy provides.  I hit publish.  The site crashed.  I'll spare you the details, but five hours and three increasingly heated phone calls to tech support later, a sweet guy named George from Go Daddy set me straight.

"Sir, you looped around our graphic interface to write your own html, right?
"Yes, pretty impressive, huh?"
"Sir, you missed a single closing bracket on your main page.  That was enough to crash your entire site."
"Oh.  Um, oops."

OK--long story short--there are so many lessons to be learned from this.  About humility.  About knowing the limits of one's technical skills.  About treating tech support nicely.  Always!  I'll simply state the obvious.  Small things can be really powerful sometimes.  In this case, my entire educational program had ground to a halt because of a single missing keystroke.  I was impressed, for sure.

Allen