It ignites terror in every blogger world-wide. That moment when you accidentally hit Publish instead of Save Draft or when you schedule an unedited blog post for the distant future, only to completely forget about it.
SPOILER ALERT for any of you living under a pebble who have yet to watch Game of Thrones season 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6.
So here are the nine stages…
1. You hear a little ‘ping’ on your phone notifying you that your scheduled post has been successfully published.
2. But the full magnitude of your predicament doesn’t dawn on you straight away. Instead, you see another notification happily informing you that a grand total of nine people have liked your post. You are super chilled about getting likes – as always.
3. But then, the Jon-Snow-just-died horror sets in. It’s a devastation unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. An article has gone live on your blog and you hadn’t even finished it.
4. And even worse, it’s full of embarrassing stuff that you would never, ever let anyone read. Little notes saying: ‘this sounds stupid’, ‘fix this part ASAP’ and ‘why does spell check say this isn’t a word? I’m sure it’s a word. OMG but thesaurus.com says that ‘unpublish’ really isn’t a word. Like, since when?’
5. Sadly, there are no Lonely Planet guide books or Bear Grylls’ survival instructions to help you prepare for this mother-of-all-bombs. It’s like Ned Stark has died all over again. And you’re pretty sure there’s no way he can come back from that.
6. Before you head for your isolated cabin in the woods, you do a little google search and realise you aren’t the only idiot in the world who’s done this. There’s Roxical Thinking’s short retraction, Wales Online’s predictive blunder, Codewryter’s inside info about a super awesome preventative Plugin, and Dr. Jon P. Heins relatable experience that leaves you feeling sickly satisfied that you’re not the only one. Yes! Exclusive club!
7. So you sit back and think, well only nine people have liked it right? But then a strange thought occurs to you. Hang on… how many people have viewed it so far? You quickly check out your stats page. AND OH MY GOD. It’s way more than nine. WAY MORE #imabail
8. You finally pull your post, but by that time at least 50 people have viewed it and you’re wondering why the f— you didn’t do that earlier. You’d rather be a Lannister than experience all this humiliation.
(I HAVE to do this to my cat)
9. While you’re sewing your golden lion onto an old school red jumper, another notification pings. But this one is different. Very different. Someone called HARLOW HAYES has just followed you. Thank you HARLOW. I love you HARLOW. It feels just like the day when Jon Snow came back to life.
P.s. HARLOW HAYES is the most recent person to follow my blog, someone did follow me when I accidentally published my article, but I can’t remember who it was. The offending article in question was called ‘9 indie author blogs you should be following’ – argh no capitals and it only got 2 likes before I took it down (and no I haven’t published it for real yet – decided to write this article instead to share all the horror and devastation I felt). Kudos to David Prosser at barsetshirediaries and Writergurlny for their unending kindness.
And also big thank you to lorraineamers, Eve Messenger, Oladatter, Riya Solanki and John Davis Frain for the lovely comments and likes they left (on different articles) that partially shielded my ego during this terrible episode in my life (actually, it’s happened to me three times, but let’s not go into that right now…)
Gifs sourced from: hilariousgifs.com & makeagif.com
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