Friggatriskaidekaphobia

July 13, 2007 on 8:15 am | In Business, Funnyish, Insider View, Rants, Tech News by Josh Jones |

Usually I’m no triskaidekaphobiac, but I already know it’s going to be a very unlucky day for me today; the 13th of the month.

Not only that, I don’t know about you folks in Europe and Asia and Africa and Mexico, but right now, this July, in America, the 13th is falling on a Friday!

And everybody universally knows (even Thetans) that bad things happen on Friday the 13th.

Especially for me. Especially today.

Why?

Because today is my wife’s last day at her job. She’s retiring at the ripe old age of 30 from cancer biology to start a floral design business.

I, on the unfortunate hand, am not retiring. In fact, I’m going to have to work about 8% HARDER.. just to make up for the lost income! And, if she decides to spend any of her extra free time not designing florals but instead buying, in a month or two I estimate I’m going to have to be working about 800% HARDER!

And that’s where the web hosting angle of this post comes in. (I still feel an inexplicable urge that I need to tie my posts into Web Hosting at least a smidge.)

You see, as unlucky as it is for me to start working 800% harder, it’s doubly unlucky for you, Happy DreamHost Customer.

It’s well known in business. Wait, scratch that.. it’s well known in the Web Hosting business. Okay, sheesh.. it’s well known in the DreamHost Web Hosting business, that things work best when the Honchos are on vacation.

It always seems as though the moment I start messing with anything, just trying to whip up some random boring newsletter feature, the rest of the company goes irrationally bonkers.

JUST because I don’t notify them first? JUST because I don’t test things even once before I copy them live? JUST because it causes hundreds upon thousands of unnecessary support cases, that could have been avoided if only I’d rolled it out a tiny bit more gradually?

Seems a bit unfair to me, all that hate. I just ask that everybody wait one day before passing judgement, please!

Everything I do, I do only to mercilessly crush our competition! And that’s to everyone’s benefit. Especially mine my wife’s.

But really, as nice as it is to sit back and your tray table in their upright and locked position, it doesn’t really make any sense! And I’m not just talking about that sentence. What I mean is if, like mine, your goal is to ruthlessly crush all those inferior, it doesn’t make any sense to sit back and blog post all the time when you could be working 800% HARDER to make some crazy new feature that breaks everything… at first!

But at second, things start to heal… and, just like a torn ACL, they heal stronger. And with more money. And blog posts. And wives.

What am I babbling about?

Well, the real take home message is that I should probably lay off the wine before writing this stuff. Really, I should just lay off the wine before seven in the morning, period. That’s rum time.

Anyway, I think I’ve sort of made this point before, and I don’t want my posts to start repeating themselves so soon in my blogging career, so I’d better come up with an original point before I wrap things up.

And uh, that is, that, er.. how about: we stopped decreasing disk and bandwidth quotas for new signups!

Does that mean “our precious rep is restored?” I dunno, maybe a little? Maybe a little more will be restored in a fortnight, when it’ll have finally been a full year since our last (unplanned) power outage?

Aw yeah. That’ll be pretty sweet. Our competitors must now be trembling in their homeless shelters!

Oh yeah, that also reminds me: July 23rd-25th Dallas and I are going to HostingCon 2007 in Chicago. Since we’re soo un-lame, we’ve never been before. We’re really only going this time because Dallas wants to meet my other friend named Dallas, who lives in Chicago. Then, July 26th-28th we’ll be in Cincinatti, visiting my other good friends, Houston, Austin, and New York.

Secondarily, Dallas (of DreamHost) is going to talk at the con about us “being green.”

I’m tagging along in the hopes I meet some competitors to rend limb from limb. (And heh, I got a free pass by registering as “press.”)

Isabel Wang said I could… and I really need to conserve money.

(I’ve got a wife to support.)