Things I Get Wrong

Introduction

For nearly two months (July 29th to 19th September) I did not receive a Top Story. I lost a lot of readers, and my paranoia was telling me I had been put on a blacklist. That caused me to be a little upset, but I could not speak to anyone about it. I was proved wrong but had accepted that there would be no more Top Stories and I would have to be satisfied with reads, which are still significant and then I formulated a plan to deal with the situation as I saw it.

The music is "Dark As A Dungeon" by Johnny Cash, he has been on my mind since I listened to the stunning "Bitter Tears" album.

What I Did

I started to apply logic to the situation and thought it may be something that I had done that meant I would not be seen for a Top Story and I thought it may have been including Emojis as part of my name.

I tried removing emojis, but there was no change, so I put them in to make myself a little more noticeable to people, and I do love people giving me attention. Is that a bad thing? Outside of Vocal and Facebook, I will talk to anyone, though not everyone likes being talked to, but it is the only way I see to making new friends, and I believe you can have too many friends. This was the Top Story that proved me wrong, people seemed to like it a lot, including Vocal.

Then Vocal announced editor improvements which means we can now edit everything, including the title (remembering that the title forms the web address of the story so a change to that means all shared links will no longer work) and they have changed our profile page, which I thought was for the last piece you changed, but that would mean new stories would appear and they don't so I haven't a cluse what the criteria is, it isn't in the drop-down and there has been no explanation about this that I have seen, and they still refuse to give us a read count on stories or fix their flawed stats reporting that I reported three years ago,

I have a story that had six hearts, four comments and a single read. When I tried to access it from a link, it failed. I was going to report it, but I found that I could access it from my stats page. I then made a slight change and then it became accessible again, so sometimes you just need to try something simple and it may fix the problem.

I know that the fix has made it readable now, but I can't find it in my stats and because of the reasons above, I don't know how many reads it has. It now has six hearts and five comments but that is all I know:

often I make mistakes due to being rished or not being given the information I need. I will ask people to write things down or send an email but they will still insist on giving me instructions verbally, and then I forget something and get things wrong.

Similarly, people will ask me for something, and I will say I will send a text or email, and they still say "Just tell me". I tell them and still send a text or email.

Conclusion

I am nowhere near perfect, I know that but I try my best, and I still make mistakes, but usually sort them out when I get all that I need.

The guy who really taught me how to program, Sean Pond and Littlewoods around 1980, taught me some amazing techniques. When I mentioned how good he was, someone told me he made loads of mistakes, but was very fast in fixing them, and that, I think is a good way to be, If you make a mistake find a way to fix it.

Thank you so much for reading.