Futility

I have truly learnt the meaning of this word today. We lost our other designer at work and Tim's been on leave for a couple days. I got in today to 100 unread emails in the work inbox. 7 hours later and it is down to 65. By tomorrow I fully expect that to be back towards three figures.

I am also tasked with maintaining a key partnership website, but the set of morons who kept it ticking over before managed to make a right pigs ear of it, leaving recurring problems and today a tidal wave of inefficiency and procedural neglect dropped on my desk like a sack of steaming shit. I managed to sort that out eventually, but not before another many headed monster jumped out of the cupboard.

This new beast was in the shape of our external web hosts. pickaweb. Generally, we have very few problems with them and that is to their credit. However, when you need help you are better off killing yourself. At some point they subscribed to some Indian call centre for their tech support and it really is the most miserable excuse for help. Today it was a cgi script that inexplicably deleted itself from the server. You and I both know the solution, reinstate the script. Two hours and several angry emails later and they manage to inform me what the problem is and how I can fix it (ie, what I already know). Except they are under the daft impression that I can access their hosting service plans and make sweeping changes to the server. I lost patience and am now almost home. Tomorrow I get to find out whether my final outraged email has yielded some results. If not, a search for a decent web host shall begin.