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Diary of a report writer and his big break into bad business

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Going back a long way, a local sports club (actually, the county club, which played at one of the most famous grounds in the world) wanted to get online. I was a member there, so they asked me to do it.

This was back in the days of pure(-ish) HTML, and even the WYSIWYG editors required code editing frequently because they left crap behind if you weren't careful.

The problem was that the person who headed the department which would be responsible for it insisted on making changes herself on a frequent basis, and if you know what I mean about people who have to write reports but can't use things like 'grammar' and 'spelling' properly, you can easily imagine the problems the 'grammar' of a language like HTML was going to throw up.

Since she was there until after 11pm some nights (mind you, so was I - it was a private club and I was a member, after all), she'd call at all hours (and if you'd had a few beers, 'thinking' wasn't always that easy, especially when 'seeing' was also being affected by a good night in the club).

One of the worst things was when she started copying-and-pasting directly from Word. Suddenly, pages that were only a few kB turned into MB Leviathans because of all the extra mark up she'd added without realising.

She often swore blind she 'hadn't touched anything', but I could see from the logs what times things had been tinkered with. But she was also one of those people who takes offence easily - frequently using it as a defence mechanism to avoid simply owning up to something minor. She'd fall out with me because of it, then be 'off' with me for weeks.

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