Blah blah disclaimer, blah blah long time ago, blah blah nicer person nowadays.
Note: A non-technical translation of this story is available for the benefit of the electronically-challenged. Skip to the bottom if you are one of these unfortunates.
So a few days after the Great Meltdown, things calmed down somewhat and BossLady evidently decided that she could start talking to me normally again. I walked in on Saturday morning to find BossLady in my chair again, goofing around on the computer. She chirped a few updates in my general direction — this listing came in, that property is pending sale, and so on — and then she said, “By the way, I was looking at our Web site and I noticed a JavaScript error, I just thought you ought to know.”
I didn’t use any JavaScript on the site when I redesigned it. Not even a little bit. Just HTML, CSS, PHP, and a MySQL database.
So I immediately said, “There isn’t any JavaScript on the site.”
Sing it with me if you know the words: BossLady kept talking as if she hadn’t heard me. She said that she noticed this JavaScript error while looking at the site on my computer (the brand-new one that was just purchased a few days ago), but the site was fine on BossMan’s laptop.
This was not doing any favors for the persistent headaches I’d been having for several weeks. It also wasn’t helping my patience with BossLady, coming so soon on the heels of the Great Meltdown.
I said, “I didn’t use JavaScript.”
Second verse, same as the first: More yapping about the JavaScript error. She didn’t tell me where she saw it or what she was doing when she saw it, didn’t show me where she saw it, but she said that it happened when she “clicked through our site.”
I said, in the tone of someone who is just about ready to check out of this joint, “I didn’t put any JavaScript in the code.” (Note to hardcore geeks: I know that HTML is not code. It’s markup. I know. Just leave it.)
BossLady repeated again that she noticed it on the new computer but not on BossMan’s laptop. I sensed that she was getting pissed off at me and was attempting to do pretty much what I was doing: Get through a thick skull by dint of sheer repetition.
I stuck to my guns: “I didn’t put any JavaScript in the code so I don’t know what it could be.”
She said, “I’m just thinking of our customers.” Presumably at this point she was thinking that I wouldn’t admit I’d made a mistake on the site, and she was now appealing to my professionalism. I don’t know.
I said once again, “I didn’t use any JavaScript so I don’t know what it could be.” BossLady finally gave up.
What the hell is wrong with this woman? Your Web designer says that no JavaScript was used in the making of your site. Therefore, any JavaScript errors that you see must be coming from somewhere else and are therefore not your Web designer’s problem. Right? Oh, no, the Web designer must be mistaken. The Web designer must have written some JavaScript without realizing it, and it was bad. Or maybe some JavaScript simply emerged from the celestial æther of the Astral Planes and inserted itself into your Web site, only to throw an error that your Web designer needs to fix right now. Yeah. Astral JavaScript.
After a while, when BossLady and BossMan were gone, I went to the site myself to see if I could see what she was talking about. No errors occurred upon pageload, JavaScript or otherwise. None.
At this point I’ll mention that our site is something of a portal in addition to a place to display our listings, because we do link to a lot of offsite content. Click certain links and you’ll be taken to a site that features details of our listings; click certain other links and you’ll be taken to “virtual tours,” which are hosted on another site specifically for that purpose. I made the template for the way the portal is set up; now my site-related duties mainly consist of adding new links and blurbs to the database, making sure that none of the links are dead and that each link is pointed at the right listing, the right virtual tour, and so forth. I have no control over what happens once these offsite links are clicked, though.
Since BossLady had said that the Astral JavaScript error had happened while she was “clicking through” the site, I tried a couple of links to see what happened. Sure enough, when I clicked a virtual tour, the tour site came up with a Java error. Not an error, really, just a notification that the Java plug-in wasn’t installed: “You need a Java-capable browser to view this content. Consider upgrading.” The virtual tours (which, again, are not part of our site but are hosted on a virtual tour site) use Java applets.
Let me point out, once again, that I do not have a degree, or anything even close to something resembling a degree. I’m a complete amateur. And yet, I know that there is a difference between Java and JavaScript.
I went to Java.com and installed it. In the unlikely event that BossLady (who “almost has a Master’s Degree in Computer Science”) still remembers this on Monday, she’ll probably greet me with thanks “for whatever you did to fix the JavaScript error!” One of the perks of my job is that whenever something miraculously rights itself, BossLady will often credit me with “working my magic” to fix it.
I wish I could explain things to BossLady. I wish I could say to her, “Hey, BossLady, I fixed the problem. Turns out it wasn’t a JavaScript error, it was a missing Java plugin. They’re not actually the same thing, you know. Isn’t that cool?” Bitter experience has taught me that this is not possible. Not without launching a migraine-inducing, one-sided, ultimately fruitless conversation in which I would attempt to explain the difference between Java and JavaScript to someone who doesn’t even know how to effectively use Google. (In all seriousness, whenever I see an error message that I’ve never seen before? I take a screenshot of it and Google the phrase. See Adventures With Norton.)
In hindsight, like with many of these incidents, I admit that I could have handled this situation better by choosing my words more carefully. I could have patiently and quietly asked BossLady to show me where she saw the error, for example. But on the other hand, BossLady herself could have avoided the whole “Yes there is,” “No there isn’t” game by simply…showing me where she saw the error. But no, that is not Our Way.
Non-technical translation of the above anecdote:
So I made a pot of chili for BossMan and BossLady, right? And then on Saturday morning, BossLady complains to me that the tuna in the chili tastes funny. And I’m all, “Uh, there’s no tuna in this chili,” and she keeps going, “I noticed it this morning but [BossMan] didn’t have any problems with it.” I keep saying, “I didn’t put any tuna in the chili, I don’t know what’s going on here,” and she just keeps plugging away with, “We need to be sensitive to people with seafood allergies,” and I’m all, “Buh?” And when I finally figure out what the problem is, it turns out to have been something else she ate that had tuna in it, but she got confused and thought it was in the chili.
Make sense? Yeah, I know. Welcome to my world.
