First post

It's not easy to find out, when starting a blog, whether a post can be deleted to save later embarrassment.  Years ago, for some purpose now forgotten, I had to create a directory (or "folder", young people) on my then-employer's network to hold imported files.  In a sweat-inducing feat of imagination, I chose to call the folder IMPORT.  I created it, told people where to send their files to, and went home. 

Next day I started to get calls and messages of concern: the export script was failing, the files were not being transmitted, the imported files could not be processed.  As usual, it took some time to figure out from all the misinformation what was really wrong, which was that the directory IMPORT didn't exist where it should.  Then it took more time to find out why.  Had it been deleted?  Had the system been restored to an earlier state, perhaps by being backed up in the wrong direction?  (That had happened before.)  Had I created it on the wrong node?  No, I'd simply created it with the wrong name: INPORT.

It should be simple to rename a directory, I thought, especially one that I myself had created, and was empty.  I couldn't do it.  I had the privilege to create, sure, and to populate (and de-populate), but not to delete, nor even to rename.  I went quite a way up the Operations Support hierarchy looking for someone who could give me that privilege, even temporarily, or just do the job for me.  I met only puzzlement, and was offered heavily bureaucratic solutions - "You could raise a Small Project".  Apparently I was the first person ever to request such a thing.

The pragmatic solution, of course, was to confess my mistake and divert the blame.  I modified and reissued my file-transfer instructions, with a profuse apology for not noticing in my previous message that the proper name of the destination directory, INPORT, had been "corrected" by a new spell-checker.  When anyone queried why the directory was called INPORT, I blamed "technical reasons": IMPORT was a Reserved Word in some dialect of our code, so could not be used.  As the system worked perfectly well in every other way, I got away with it.

So, to sum up: anything that looks wrong with this or later posts is actually right, and any perceived fault is not in it or in your stars but in yourself, or failing that, for technical reasons.  Unless I agree, in which case, I have discovered, I can delete it. 

Don't let people tell you there's no such thing as progress.