Yesterday was as stressful a day as I have ever experienced. It started out fine — I knew what I had to do and I really didn’t expect I would have much trouble doing it. A simple task really: add email functionality to the new professor demo account pages. Simple. In fact, I looked in some of Allan’s ASP books and they all basically said, “In ASP it’s a snap to send email!” All you have to do is have a function SMTP¹ site. Fine.

I went onto the live server and, lo and behold, there’s an SMTP site set up. So I made a little ASP page the consisted of nothing but an attempted email. I got a permissions-related error. I did a search on Google for this error and found it. The first hit was to Microsoft’s support page, and it even included instructions for a fix. Simple enough — just change a few settings on some folders in the “mailroot” directory and it should be fine and dandy. I talked to Luis before fiddling with this on the live site (the staging server doesn’t have SMTP). He said the proposed changes would have no security problems, so I made them. With great anticipation I re-uploaded my little “testemail.asp” file and loaded it. Same error. I double checked the folder permissions and found that some of the changes didn’t take. Odd. So I made them again, re-uploaded yet again, tested again, received the same error message again, and muttered, “Fuck” again.

Before any of this happened, though, I talked to Kevin about it. He told me there should be no SMTP configuring necessary, and that I should throw it on the staging server. “If it doesn’t work there, it doesn’t work. I don’t want to spend a lot of time and resources on this.” He said something about using Kiki’s mailto functionality and asked how that was going. I told him I didn’t really know but that I thought she had it working more or less. “Is the mail getting sent to sales reps?” Potential trick question. I should have simply said, “I don’t know.” I should have lied in other words. Well, no — that’s not a lie. I don’t really know whether or not sales reps are getting it, but I don’t think they are. At any rate, I told him that she was and that she had set up her Exchange account to route the stuff to them. Stupid thing to say — he called Kiki and told her he didn’t want it done that way. So now she’s working on that same damn mailto functionality problem that Kevin seems to think would be a snap. In fact it should be a snap if SMTP were working, but it’s not.

I really don’t like my job now simply because I don’t feel comfortable going to anyone for help. Kiki either is not there or has her own stuff to do, and I almost always feel I’m intruding — that my questions are an annoyance to her. I can’t go to Kevin because he’ll just tell me to go out to such and such site and grab some script and throw it in.

If Peter were still the CTO, he’d have been there yesterday helping me with this damn SMTP problem. He would have called his dad; he would have talked to Microsoft (or give me the ability to do so). I see now what Brian meant when he said Peter seemed much more knowledgeable about the actual technical minutiae than Kevin. With Peter I could ask, “How do I do this?” With Kevin I feel uncomfortable even saying, “I can’t do this.” And that’s really quite ridiculous. I have no formal technical training whatsoever, and I’ve been working with ASP stuff for just a few weeks now. I’ve done everything I could to get this stupid thing working, but I just can’t get this function to work, no matter how easy Kevin tells me it should be.

I was walking home last night — terrible night not to have a ride because it was freezing. In the morning it was warm enough that I took off my hat and muff on the way to work; by the time I left at 7:30 last night, it was frigid. Anyway, I was walking home thinking about this and I realized one of the reasons I loved my job in Lipnica: it’s the only job I’ve ever had in which I was 100% confident in my ability to fulfill my responsibilities. Nothing about my job there intimidated me. I never woke up thinking about what I had to accomplish that day and thinking, “God, I hope I can figure out how to do that.” The closest I came was the first time I was in charge of the Strasbourg trip, but that wasn’t really work-related. It had nothing to do with my ability as a teacher — it was a test of my resourcefulness as a person, of course.

1 I’ve been tossing that acronym around all week now and I don’t even know what it means.