I began blogging here about four months ago, October 2006 according to my Quick Blog administration page. A friend and former colleague helped me set up this site in her office one day during some down time and since neither of us had ever created a blog before and we didn’t value one domain host over another we picked the one with the name we liked best. Since this post involves the people I get this space through and they would be the last entity on the planet I would want to piss off I will refer to them as their parallel world opposite.
StopMommy.com has made blogging so user friendly even a department store mannequin could do it. After posting a few entries and getting positive feedback I mentioned to Daughter on the phone that I wondered how many times my site had been accessed and how much I would love to find out that information. She said, “Are you suggesting you’d like to manage your statistics?” Part of me feared I wouldn’t be up to the challenge and part of me thought, “Yeah! Give me that scalpel and show me where the spleen is!” and since there is no better man than I, Gunga Din, I asked her for instructions. “Are you on the site?” she asked me. “Click on the tab that says Manage Statistics.” Never have I gotten a quicker return on an investment than I did right then on Daughter’s expensive Boston education.
Monitoring my hits became a ritual just this side of obsession. I could tell when new people visited my page versus regular readers looking in again. When I reported the numbers to Daughter a few weeks later she was encouraging. “Very respectable, Mom. People are coming back and also referring you to friends. Keep up the good work.” I felt like Sally Field at the Oscars.
Then today I logged on and clicked that familiar tab and squinted my eyes in disbelief. Half of my hits were gone. I mean, really, the number that had been climbing steadily was diminished to half the size it was yesterday. I logged off and then back on again dwelling in the idiotic possibility that I had gone on someone else’s site by mistake. With my user name and password? That would be the equivalent of putting your card in the ATM and finding yourself in another person’s account. A poor person. After realizing that can’t possibly be the case you’d have to look around the empty vault and wonder where the hell is my money?
I emailed StopMommy support but was feeling the kind of panic that can only be soothed by a human voice. They would want to talk to me anyway since the message I sent them must have sounded like the cries at the Hindenburg disaster. As the phone kept ringing I clicked on the tab again and 60 more hits had vanished. COME BACK! I paced the kitchen glued to my cell phone forgetting the boiled eggs on the burner hardening to the density of golf balls. Finally a rep picked up and glanced over my account. “Oh, look,” he said genially, “I’ve been hoping to find one sane voice all my life and here you are.” “Yes, here I am,” I replied tightly, wondering if he had family living close enough for me to torture.
He put me on hold for 12 minutes at the start of which I was instructed to press # if I didn’t want to hear their music while I waited. I pounded # and the music poured out at full high decibel static second only to the noise in my head for sheer volume. He came back and good-naturedly informed me that the technical department said they update the statistics regularly and that’s why the numbers changed. We went over the varying meanings of ‘up’ and ‘down’ and how none of this explained why my numbers were going south. He put me on hold for another 14 minutes of melody during which time I clicked on my statistics again and couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My hits were disappearing like anorexic models at Fashion Week.
When the rep returned (by this time I had to plug in my cell phone and was standing hunched over the outlet) he informed me that the tech department was working on the Quick Blog sites for the past three months (?) which might wreak havoc on my record of hits and I should have gotten an email to that effect. I told him I may not be the most observant person in the world but I certainly would have taken notice of an email from my domain host announcing A NEW VERSION OF HELL. He said to check my mail.
The only StopMommy mail is a Customer Satisfaction Survey. There are no new hits. The hits I had went away. You’re all gone and I don’t know who I’m talking to. I can hear my voice echo. I’m afraid to check my statistics again. What comes before zero?