/me puts on his 'web-troubleshooting hip waders' and steps into the murky swamp of the website…

Two minutes later voilà! the front page had returned, and the new page had also been added.

What did I learn from this? Surely I’m not a super-genius who can prophetically find problems and solve them instantly. The reason I found it so quickly and was able to revert it was because I knew that website intimately. I built it, I knew what each and every character of text needed to be, in order for it to work correctly.  I could fix that site in moments while still groggy from recently waking up – but I might take hours to fix a site designed by somebody else.  See I’m just the regular kind of genius, the kind that knows what he’s done very well, and has no clue about what other people do or how they do it.

I think if I can pull back from this even further I’d put it like this, I knew the truth about the website, I knew the way it ought to be, so any place anything differed from that state of truth, I knew immediately and was able to fix it.  There could be a million ways it could have differed from the truth it would have been impossible for me to study, learn, or even prepare for all of them – but I didn’t need to prepare for all possible contingencies, I only needed to study and know the truth in its pure state in order to restore it.

So where do we go from here? What did I really learn today, that I can fix a website I built? Yes, but I think this whole adventure and crisis served as a reminder that skill, talent, desire to fix things are worth far less when you don’t know the truth. I guess goal #1 should always be to have an unquenchable thirst for the truth and let everything else fall into place after that.

—Tom