Good Luck / Bad Luck

In my lifetime, I’ve experiences a lot of bad luck, a smattering of good luck…but very rarely both at the same time.

In fact, I recently had a bad-luck experience that turned into good luck.

If you read yesterday’s post, you’ll know all about my new vendor. (This post is Second Life related, but even in SL doesn’t interest you in the slightest, read on anyway…because while this happened in SL, it’s not really about SL)

Well, today I checked up on everything, and discovered that the vendor in my main store wasn’t working. Instead of showing off my amazing creations, it was a blank screen showing “Vendor Offline”.

I went to Sunny’s cottage and reset the server.

While my other (far lower traffic) locations updated perfectly, my main store kept getting to about 95% updated and freezing.

I tried everything. Nothing would make it work. I started swearing.

Then, despite the fact that the server is meant to work with vendors grid-wide, I decided to see if placing the server closer to the vendor would fix it. So I grabbed my server, and tucked it away in a corner of my store.

It worked, but I still wasn’t happy. Only Sunny and I (plus a few trusted friends) have access to her cottage. I didn’t like the idea of my server being out in the open, where people could try to dick with it.

I decided it would have to do, for now…and left it.

I logged out.

A couple of hours later, Sunny logs in to find her cottage, and the entire neighborhood missing. Apparently, the asshole who owns the land had sold it and cleared everything.

This isn’t entirely uncommon in SL, only usually the land owner will give notice, and anything that’s cleared from the land is returned to its owner. (If you leave an item on someone else’s land, it’s usually returned to you at the end of the day).

Sunny hasn’t got back anything she had in the cottage.

Now while I don’t revel in this, simply because Sunny lost one or two expensive custom items, I’ve got to see how good my luck was.

Here’s the thing. My entire inventory was on that server, and without it, my vendors are giant paperweights. Also, thinking I wouldn’t need them, I deleted my old vendors. I thought my clothing line was safe on my shiny new server.

In other words, if that server had gotten deleted, not only would I have had to replace it, I’d have had to upload everything I’d made again (IF I still had the original texture files in photoshop).

Plus, unlike the vendors which are infinitely copyable, the server is a one shot deal. You get one, and they’re expensive to replace…and there’s no way I could convince the guy who sold it to me that I just wanted a replacement for the lost one…and it’s not even his responsibility anyway…he could have turned around and said “Tough shit.”

In other words, if it wasn’t for that one vendor going on the fritz this morning…I’d be officially out of business.

Maybe it wasn’t a bug. Maybe my server just has a sense of self-preservation.

It’s like missing a flight, cursing your bad luck, only to find out later that the plane crashed.