Our friends at WordPress.com suggested I try their new “block” editor to see if it will make my “Likes” problem (previously reported) go away. So I need content to publish. Here’s some:

I worked in software development for a long time. I loved being a programmer. There were days when I’d wake up and be eager to get to work. Then they made me a manager. There were lots of days when I hated to get out of bed.

When we had a software problem, we often got a question we couldn’t answer. Management and our customers would ask us “when will it be fixed?” If we already knew what the problem was, we could give them an estimate. If we were in the early stages, however, when the problem was still a mystery, the only (polite) answer was “we don’t know”. Since we didn’t know what was causing the problem, how could we know when we’d be able to fix it? Of course, it’s understandable they wanted an answer, but there were times it was the dumbest question to ask.

Sometimes things got bad. We worked on an important system. It had to be up and running every weekday morning. If, for some reason, it wasn’t, lots of people would be affected. We would make the news. So the clock would start ticking. Would we be able to diagnose and correct the problem soon enough to avoid headlines the next day?

The good news is that in all the years I worked there, every time we got a call from Operations telling us something was seriously wrong, we never failed to get the system up on time. But I would always wonder. Is this going to be the time we don’t find a fix? It never was, but that was my worst (work-related) fear.

If you’re looking at this post and see my little brown icon right next to the “Liked” button, using the block editor didn’t help. There is one other thing I can try before someone at WordPress not named “L Franz” publishes an upcoming post. That’s the other thing they’ve suggested. I can’t wait to see what they’ve got to say about President Lysol.