Deep Cleansing Breath of Fire

I advised a friend who was having a frustrating day to take a nice, deep cleansing breath of fire. Turns out I needed one too.

<rant>

An email started it all - a client support person emailed me about a topic in our documentation portal. The client had gone looking for it and found that it had been replaced with a similar topic that was not what he was looking for.

It's kind of complicated to explain - inbound feed versus outbound feed, one product versus another product, content missing versus content not missing, put back the original topic versus don't put it back, blah blah blah. There was a long email thread, a short wild goose chase, a PDF sent several times, an issue-tracking ticket, and finally, FINALLY answers and a resolution.

It was partly a mistake on my part and I owned the screwup; it was partly a wrong answer from someone else, and partly non-useful half-answers to my questions from other folks. Why do software developers never answer questions fully the first time?

I'm quite sure that the developers were just as frustrated with me, so! Frustration all around!

But the mystery was solved and I was able to fix the documentation portal and I hope the client is happy and I hope certain people come down with a bad case of rectal itch. (Not really.) (Well, maybe a mild case.) (Kidding.)

</rant>

The deep cleansing breath of fire helped.