I got blamed for the Westchester County Website being down for about 5 hours last night. This happened after I left for the bus, and by the time I came to work this morning the true culprit had been caught and crucified. I had nothing to do with it, although I am changing configuration options for the main website.

The person who crashed the site claimed that he had not changed anything, and the bug was an old one. It was not. It had to have been something new that he did (he ran a script that made the temp directory write-protected). The script could not have been run recently, even though he claimed that had been running every night for months.

Everyone knows that I like to make large changes to things, so I was initially blamed. Luckily, I have made many mistakes over the years and I have learned to be very careful when it comes to things that have the big boss’ picture on them. I would let someone else push the button if I had to make changes to a very important and public site.

The programmer big lie is “It worked yesterday and I didn’t change anything”.