Flashes of Panic

I don’t serve ads on this site, and every now and then something comes along that makes me positively happy about that. There are ads on eliterunning.com, a site I have no formal connection to other than sometimes writing articles or tweaking the templates when A doesn’t understand them, and I’m now on my second installment of “updating” the ad tags at the request of her ad network, which will remain nameless for now. (It pays better than Google for this site.)

The problem is that, for the second time, the tags they’ve sent are buggy. I’ve yet to install these tags and have them “just work” the way, for example, Google stuff (e.g. Analytics) does. Every time I make the template changes, save, load the page, and … blankness. This time I fired up Firebug and saw a slew of code in the head section of the page which simply does not belong in a page header. (Images? Hello?)

I don’t get paid enough to debug these folks’ code for them, so I reverted the pages to the “old” tags, and sent back a nice detailed email telling them which flavor of fail they had shipped and requesting troubleshooting. I wish I could’ve used the phrasing I had in mind, which was somewhat more terse and called their ability to write functioning code a bit more directly into question.

The other annoying part about this company is that when they get email from me, they tend to reply directly to me without copying A, even though I’ve copied her on every message I send, and her address is at this particular domain and mine is not. It’s as though they’ve decided that since I have a male name, obviously I must be the one who’s really in charge. Last time I specifically asked them to copy her on every message; let’s see if they are a snuggly enough bunch of pandas to remember.

Update, 20 Feb.: Cynicism wins again: they forgot.

Now Playing: Monster Ballads from The Animal Years by Josh Ritter

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