Anybody who’s been in my general vicinity over the last day or so may well have learned a few new words. Naughty words. I think the asshole has been on a recruitment drive and he’s drafted in reinforcements to help support the ‘get Dee back on the cake’ campaign. He’s flooded my widgets with technical gremlins who are getting right up my nose, and pushing me to that place where in times gone by I would have had a big fat tony bear tantrum followed by a packet of hobnobs.

I’m the world’s least tolerant person when it comes to stuff that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do – especially when there’s no logic to it. If I drop something for example, and it stops working, I get it. I might not be happy about it, but I can see the cause and effect, and I understand why it broke. When something just plain old stops working for no apparent reason, well that’s like a personal challenge…I can’t leave it alone.

And lets just imagine that it relates to something I don’t really understand to begin with – I’m thinking technology – and I am that person, the one who pushes the button in a dozen different ways thinking it will have a different outcome before the penny drops that it has in fact gone kaput. For no reason.

I’ll press it softly. Then a bit harder. Then I’ll push it whilst holding down another random button. I might get the instructions out at this point just to check I’m pushing the right button to start with, even though I’ve been pressing the same button in the same way since I got it, without a problem. Then as the red mist descends I’ll push it several times in quick succession, by which time I’ve usually started muttering under my breath too in a kind of pincer-movement multi-tasking kind of way.

So now I’ve set the scene, you’ll begin to understand just how easy these gremlins are finding it to twist my melon. For those of you who have subscribed to my blog and have noticed that the daily email notifications have stopped appearing in your in-box..? Blame the gremlins. It makes no sense. Nothing has changed. No settings, no code, nothing at all…except I now have a flatteringly long list of people who like to ponder the latest post subject when it goes live.

Of course it worked fine when there was just half a dozen of my friends who were being supportive and who agreed to be guinea pigs for me. It even lulled me into a false sense of security by working fine for the first two weeks of being ‘live’ as the list was growing. Now? Lets just stop working for no reason at all. AAARGH!!!

However, did I reach for the hobnobs right away..? No. My strategy was to outsmart the asshole and his band of merry men by finding a workaround. So I sat, for an hour and a half, and copied the list of individual email addresses one by one into an email from my BOTSG email programme, figured out how to drop in a link to today’s post, composed a little ditty and pressed send, without one hobnob being consumed. Satisfied smile, take that asshole.

Aw Shit. After a succession of ‘pings’ into my inbox it became apparent that the asshole still held the winning hand. Because I’ve promised not to share anyone’s details and I’m uber-cautious about doing so, I had sent the email to myself, and copied every email address into the BCC field, so nobody could see who else had had the email. And in doing so had managed to convince my own email programme that I was in fact trying to SPAM you all so every single email was sent back to me with its tail between it’s legs. FFS!!!

So I must beg your patience, posse…I am working on it, and I’m sorry that your promised BOTSG nuggets aren’t reaching you on quite the regular basis I promised…I’ve just had a rather encouraging ‘ticket’ from a charming chap on the help desk of my web host who seems to be wielding his spanner and tinkering with stuff as we speak, so I’m still living in hope that I can beat the asshole at his own game and send the gremlins to annoy someone else.

In the meantime, if you’re on Facebook, and you ‘like’ the Break Out The Skinny Girl Facebook page, a link to the daily blog post will show up in your news feed, so that’s one way you won’t miss anything, whilst we’re sticking the wheels back on the widget.

On a positive note, I’m happy to report that no hobnobs were consumed in the midst of this meltdown!!

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