Funk To The Rescue

Friday was going along just fine.

I was working on a document that was coming together nicely. I'd done a lot of it on Thursday, so Friday was nice and relaxed. I finished up the content, then tackled the formatting and layout. I knew that would be tricky, because my authoring tool can be cranky.

Sure enough, it was. It looked just fine in the source, but the PDF output simply would not behave. It was refusing to indent my bulleted lists and it was driving me nuts. I messed with everything I could mess with, but no luck. I finally decided to leave it be and send it for review, with a stern warning to ignore the faulty formatting.

Then I saved it. Then I committed it source control, and POOF!

My finished document had changed back into its original draft - the one with only the first section.

I thought, "Oh holy dear sweet Jesus! What have I done?"

But no worries! I'd just revert to the one I just committed!

Nope.

And it was three o'clock. On Friday. Goddammit.

Oh well, it was only two pages long. I resigned myself to doing it again.

Luckily, it didn't take too long; after all, I'd already done it once. Once again, I moved from content to format, ready for a fight. I generated the output.

And then, somehow, it worked! Well, the bullets worked. The fonts were a tad screwy, but I know how to fix that. I saved it. I copied both the source file and the PDF to the desktop. I committed it to source control - and it went just fine. I pushed the files to the repository - they went without complaint.

Whew.

I was relieved, but still highly annoyed. I shut everything down, grabbed my coat, and headed out the door, grumbling and grousing.

I started up the car and turned on the radio, and Jamiroquai's Virtual Insanity was playing! Right! It was the Funky Friday show on WXPN!

I felt better. How could I not? After that, the Ohio Players sang Who'd She Coo?.  I started to shake a little. And as I pulled onto the highway, on came P. Funk, "directly from the Mothership, top of the Chocolate Milky Way, 500,000 kilowatts of P Funk-power."

Well, I couldn't help it - I started groovin' to the beat. I probably looked like I had a bee down my back or ants in my pants, but I didn't care. The funk has that effect.

Such is the power of of the Mothership.