Tech-chivalry -- coding for hankies

Something sweetly reassuring happened to me yesterday. I was the recpient of some tech-chivalry. What is tech-chivalry you ask? Well let me explain...

In days gone by, ladies were cocooned within a benevolent, patriarchal society. Comforted by the knowledge that should something disastrous and otherwise unanticipated occur, the men in their world would admirably leap to their rescue; an offer of an umbrella, perchance it should rain; provision of a hanky, should something provoke them to tears.

Now let's be realistic here. These days, my coat has a hood. Rain is annoying, but rarely does it discomfort me more than the sheer annoyance that I wasted 20 minutes straightening my hair. My bag is large. It always contains an umbrella AND a pack of tissues. I'm reasonably self-supportive should a mishap occur, so previous opportunities for chivalry would be lost on me.

So what happened to me yesterday?

In the way that only a distracted, multi-tasking female can, I broke three pages of our [live] conference site which I'm responsible for editing. I deleted the main navigation and overwrote the original pages. No going back. Compounding my fury, I was mid way through explaining to a colleague the supporting arguments for my assertion that I should NEVER have been entrusted with responsibility for editing sites outside of our content manager... when the phone rang.

I answered it, noting from the caller display that it was one of our service providers. He was returning my call, to tell me about a bug fix for something I'd reported earlier in the day. I tried to listen as he told me what he'd fixed and why it had happened, but all I could focus on was the clock ticking by as more and more people would notice my evidential muck-up on the conference pages.

"Are you OK?" he said, and I mumbled that I was fine, not to worry. "Are you sure?" he said again, "you don't sound it".

No pain, no gain I thought. So I confessed to him the nature of my nice little mess. "OK", he said, "let me see the code, I'm sure I'll be able to see the problem".

Less than 5 minutes later, he'd identified the problem (a script referencing the wrong website) and showed me how to fix it. What's more, he offered to stay on the line whilst I dutifully copied and pasted his correct code on to my duff pages and uploaded the correct code to my site. It was all good again. Perfect.

And that was it. When I really needed someone to rescue me from my lame, girly predicament (let's not even pretend it was particularly complicated), along he came to offer the proverbial hanky. Simple yet effective, like producing an umbrella when it started to rain. How modern though - that little gesture from a techie said more to me about chivalry than any crisp, white hanky offer ;o) Thanks C!