Way Too Late Last Night

So yesterday I decided to make what I thought would be a quick, harmless, “ten-minute improvement” to the website database. You know the kind. The little tweaks you do just to smooth things out. Streamline a process. Make it cleaner. More efficient. Cross all the i’s and dot all the t’s. Yes, I know that’s backwards. I say it that way on purpose. It’s tradition at this point.

Anyway, this particular process dates back to Ancient Richard Times. We’re talking years ago, before I knew any better. It runs a recordset loop and, as part of that loop, it actually opens up the customer form to do some work. Horrible practice by today’s standards, but it’s been surprisingly bulletproof. Maybe once a month it locks up, and my Watchdog utility steps in, restarts Access, and life goes on.

But yesterday I watched it happen and thought, “Well that’s silly. I can fix that.” No need to open a form. Just handle everything in the background with a proper recordset. Cleaner. Faster. More elegant.

Famous last words.

I rewrote it. Beautifully, I might add. Proper error handling. Nice clean logic. The kind of code you sit back and admire for a second before moving on. What I did not realize, however, was that other parts of the system were quietly depending on that form being open. Not for the main task, but for things that happened afterward.

So now this function broke that function, which broke another procedure, which triggered a cascade failure worthy of a warp core breach. At one point I seriously considered restoring from the pre-change backup and calling it a night. Crawl into bed. Pretend none of this ever happened.

But no. The perfectionist in me took the conn.

So down the rabbit hole I went. Fix this dependency. Rewrite that routine. Adjust the follow-up process. Then I discovered the user upload procedure, the one that pushes data from my local Access database to the web server, also relied on the old behavior.

That fix broke credit card processing.

Because of course it did.

Next thing I know it’s 4:00 in the morning. I’m squinting at the screen with my one good eye, testing transactions, running uploads, watching logs scroll by. I even had to switch the VBA editor into dark mode because the white background was burning a hole straight through my skull. So if you notice future videos looking a little more “night shift friendly,” that’s why.

The good news is by Monday morning everything was stable again. Systems operational. Engines back online. No customers the wiser.

But there were a couple of solid takeaways from the adventure.

First, backups are life. I had multiple. I made another one right before starting the “ten-minute fix.” At any point I could have rolled back instantly. That safety net makes deep surgery possible.

Second, it’s always the ten-minute changes. Every time you think, “I’ll knock this out before dinner,” you are lying to yourself. That is never a ten-minute change. That is a six-hour marathon wearing a fake mustache.

And the final lesson, especially for anyone doing client work, is about estimates. Never give the optimistic number. Never tell the captain it’ll take two days.

You tell him two weeks.

Because when you pull it off in five days, you look like a miracle worker. Scotty understood this. Reputation management through strategic pessimism. Don’t be Geordie giving accurate engineering timelines.

Be Scotty.

End log.

LLAP RR