Setting up a simple email list for my shop took me three days

I thought it would be a quick job on Monday morning. I needed to move my customer list from my old point-of-sale system to a new email service. The export file was a mess and the import kept failing with error codes I didn't understand. I finally got it working late Wednesday after watching a bunch of tutorial videos and cleaning the data by hand. Has anyone else had a simple tech task blow up like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

young.nora2mo ago

Remember when "simple" meant like 20 minutes? I've lost whole weekends to stuff like that.

ivanross2mo ago

Oh man, my buddy decided to "just clean the gutters" last fall. That turned into replacing a whole section of rotted fascia board, a trip to the hardware store, and then repainting the entire side of his house so it would match. He was out there until Sunday night with a headlamp on.

michael_jenkins392mo ago

I used to think data migration was just a copy-paste job. Last month I spent a full day fixing date formats in a spreadsheet before anything would upload. @ivanross has the right idea, these simple jobs always hide a bigger mess. What was the worst error code you got?