Now About That Glitch

If yesterday wasn't stress enough, my blog post caught a glitch. No, it's not there any more, and my reader's counter - the one only I see as the author - tells me that only two of you encountered it before I finally figured out, not how it happened, but how to fix it. Not that I have any clue of the how or why it went from nothing helping to finding a fix.

 I was going through my fourth or fifth proofreading. That's very typical. I'm a terrible typist, or as they call it now, keyboardist. I read it first in the format I write it in, looking like a standard blank word processing page. When I preview it, I see what you see:  the format  changes to very narrow, the colors change, and what I see of the text is more likely to be what is really there instead of what I thought I wrote. Don't ask me why, but it works. It also tends to point out silly grammar, bad phrasing, even plain stupid ideas.

I'd gotten about 3/5ths through, and suddenly everything disappeared beyond the spot I was at. The only thing I had done just before that was delete a stray lower case "a". I had no idea why it was there, how it got there, what on earth I might have been trying to say. It had no context, sitting alone between a completed sentence and the next line. In deleting it, everything after it vanished!

I panicked, of course. I'd been interrupted for a bit between writing and proofing. I couldn't reinvent the ending. My mind was blank. And yet, somehow it had gotten posted, so it was sitting there for anybody to see, dangling like a long lost participle. I switched between my rough draft, the one I can still edit, and the public copy. There were times I had it all in the editing page, but that pesky "a" was dangling there again somehow so I tried to delete it.  All the text below it vanished again. Somehow it was there but not there. 

I thought I'd try a copy-paste to a word processing sheet, but even at the page with my power to edit, I couldn't highlight anything for copying, much less pasting so it would be recoverable. Back and forth, back and forth, here, then gone, then back.

Eventually I scrolled way down on the public view page, and after about eight times the total length of the whole post, there again was the text I thought lost. Back on my editing page and it sat right where it ought to be, almost. The pesky "a" was still there, and the beginning of the next paragraph was indented about halfway across the page. I tried again to delete the "a" and again lost the tail end of my blog post. I tried other stuff, and nada. No improvements. Besides my laptop power level was redlined. Time to plug in, give it a rest, go do something else. ANYTHING ELSE! 

Unfortunately, somehow when  that post had gotten published, I couldn't remove it. Weirdly, on the public page, that little "a" didn't exist. Boy, though, the endless space did.

That "anything else" lasted only about ten minutes. I just wouldn't let go, not after the day I'd had. There were a few more cycles of kill-the-"a", hunt-the-tail-of-the-post, kill-the-"a", etc. Steve got a phone call from a good friend, and these days those are loud and on speaker while he sits 3 feet away. Totally distracting, and while I often chime in, it just wasn't the right time then. I picked up my laptop and went down to my bed, returning when the call ended. Leaving the room hadn't solved my problem, nor kick-started my brain into an idea. In fact it was totally stupid since my laptop still needed charging.

Plugging back in, I decided to put a disclaimer on the top of my blog, the one two of you, plus Steve, read. I say it that way because he reads all my posts but his doing that never reaches my counter. We suspect it's because both machines bounce off the same wifi so the machines are programmed to count him as me. I don't count either. No cheating on your count levels, you bots! Anyway, since the gap in my post was so long, I needed to explain there was a glitch I couldn't fix, and please continue scrolling down (forever)  to get to the end.

There was some TV to watch, conversations to have. And yet I couldn't let it go. I just couldn't.

When I came back to it, somehow that pesky "a" was missing. No clue how or why. Might as well credit Santa. Hmmm, changes are possible then. I fiddled a bit, but that gap was the equivalent of about 8 pages long, so I couldn't tell if there was any progress. At least anything I did wasn't flipping me into nothing-on-the-screen-land. And somehow on the editing page the gap was gone, the two pieces of post were at least visible in the same general space. There was a bit of a space between them, so I just tried deleting space between them. 

Lo and behold, my cursor moved without kicking me into blank space hell and kept traveling across the page. Maybe there were no shortcuts but I could delete the space one character at a time! I tried it for a while, always starting about 3 characters from the right border and stopping before hitting the left border, trying to avoid whatever was fubar in that post, then placing the cursor back on the right side, deleting its way across to the left. Over and over and over. Then over again. Thank goodness the delete button doesn't need a tap for each stroke but can be held down!

About every three minutes, I'd save my (thus far imagined) progress by hitting "update". I'd go back to the public page trying to detect any progress. but there was still so much space in that gap it was undetectable, if it was happening at all. I kept going back to it. What else was there to do? My silly pride kicked in. I wasn't going to leave myself open to ridicule by not fixing that glitch. It's the same thing which prompts me to proof my posts  4 or 5 times before publishing. I need them perfect. You don't need an annoying reason not to read them.

I guess I persisted as I did for so long because it's the season to be operating on faith. Faith that the sun will come back and the world will again have long days which can grow crops. Faith that all the extra lights decorating everywhere will be cheerful and not bankrupt us with our electric bill. Faith that we'll warm up again. Faith that wars are elsewhere, just like nearly all the other terrible things on the news. Faith that whatever our individual religious beliefs are, they are correct.

By about half an hour into deletions I could finally see progress on the public page. It didn't take me quite so long to cross that great empty divide. Now was not the time to give up, even if it was tomorrow officially. Delete, delete, delete. Update. Delete............

After another 15 minutes or so I finally could see a line of text on both the top and bottom of the Big Blank! The progress was real! Were I younger and had the day been better I might have been dancing with joy, but it was simply time to keep plugging instead. 

If you've read it, you know the gap has closed. You can't tell where it was. And after 5 hours sleep, here's another post. It's part apology to the two of you (plus Steve) who had to scroll wayyyyyyyyyyyyy down to finish.

Uh, you did, didn't you?

It's also me wondering why nothing helped correct it and then suddenly that little "a" disappeared and everything worked again. And maybe a little plug for sympathy, right?