Technical Difficulties

I had a blog post typed and ready to go, and, wow, was it good. It was so good that I congratulated myself, saying, "Hell of a job, Byron!" for how well-written, entertaining, and informative it was. I blog about funny stuff, and I blog about serious matters, and I blog about things that you on the outside might find in some way informative, but rarely do I compose a blog post that represents a confluence of all three of these features. This was, I'm telling you now, one hell of a post.

All that remained was to proofread it and send it on its way, via the JPay e-mail app. This app, however, is janky as all get-out. One of its worst handicaps is that it doesn't allow users to save drafts for long periods of time. When I hit the Save icon, this message pops up: "You have 1 day to send this email draft, otherwise it will be deleted." I hit OK, then a second popup box appears: "Your message has been saved as a draft." I hit OK again. After that, the app takes me back to the Drafts screen. The whole process can be pretty annoying.

Even more of a pain in the ass is when you've spent an hour composing what seems like a really clever post, a topical one with lots of your trademark wry wit and humorous sarcasm, only to save your work as an e-mail draft intended to be sent the very next day, then sit on it for what couldn't have been sixty minutes (all right, I'll grant you that it might've been an hour and a half) too long.

I woke up from a nap and went straight for my tablet. It took a century to boot up. The e-mail app took three decades to load. I tapped the menu and selected Drafts. Nada. My post — more than an hour's worth of top-quality writing, replete with the kind of witty narrative that would've had you ROTFLing and jamming the comments section with adulation and love — was gone. Vanished. Auto-deleted. One with the digital void.

I wept for what the world had lost. Then I ate some peach cobbler and set my jaw, resolved to the onerous task of writing of this replacement post, which pales in comparison to the awesome brilliance of what you almost got to read. Think of all the writers throughout history whose works were lost by moldering in forgotten drawers, landing in garbage dumps, burning in fires, sinking into the seas, or, as often happens in our age, getting backspaced out of existence. We can now add another cause to the long list of literature's enemies: getting JPayed.