URL be sorry!

What else was I supposed to do before I retired?

I hope this is a funny story. I fear it’s not.

Many years ago I registered several URLs for the Harrisonburg and Sixth District Democratic committees in case this internet thing caught on. It turned out to be a wise precaution.

Some years later, in June of 2015, I decided to disengage from the party infrastructure. Yes, I’m aware that was six and a half years ago. Thank you for asking. I may be out after this year.

I’ve since transitioned from a Big Important Democrat to a party wise man, the difference being like the one between drunks and alcoholics. One doesn’t have to all those damned meetings.

I contacted one of the young men in the party – they look that way to me anyway – and arranged to give the committee the URLs. Two years later I contacted one of the two young men who each thought the other had taken care of it. Based on the emails I’ve reviewed, we transferred the URLs that day.

Transferring the district URLs was more problematic, but that has less to do with process and more to do with a wing of the party that worships a woman who looks good in a ball gown and an old man who looks goofy in his cold-weather Inauguration Day duds. Still, there was experience to be had.

Regardless, the Dems are a volunteer organization with unpaid people working ten or more hours a week and having to attain and discard expertise depending on the needs of the day. And they got it done.

So maybe it just looks easy to me to transfer a URL. And maybe I’m paying the price for my own laziness or inattention. Some years back, for reasons I’ve completely forgotten, I registered a URL for a JMU prof to point to his studies of a Tudor-era cleric. The guy was burned at the stake – the cleric, not the prof – but as a courtesy to his friend Cromwell he was strangled to death first so the heat wouldn’t kill him. They were courteous people back then. If they’d wanted to be really vicious, and if the technology had existed, they could have made him transfer a URL before striking the match.

I don’t know if registering the URL to my personal account was a blunder of some sort or if it was just easier than dealing with whatever segment of the JMU administrationary Tilt-a-Whirl would have handled such things. But at least I didn’t inadvertently transfer it to the Harrisonburg Democratic Committee, which would have been funny, to me at least, unless it broke some law.

But the laws on URLs are spotty, if they exist. If they pass a new one and name it Joey’s Law in my honor, I would like it to say that any public university in the Commonwealth of Virginia  with more than 15,000 undergraduate students should have at least one person on campus in a full-time position, tenure-track or RTA, who knows how to register a URL. I assume there will have to be some quantity of whereto and thereof thrown in, but I understand that. Paraphrasing Josey Wales, Legislative Services gotta eat, same as university administrators.

I checked today and found that I originally contacted the university on November 8 to tell them I owned a URL a prof needed. To give some historical perspective, we hadn’t heard of Omicron back then and the Fox Christmas tree hadn’t yet burned down. It was a while back. The URL expires on Saturday, 40 days and 40 nights later, and it’s going to be a near thing whether it gets re-registered in time.

Had I been a wiser man, or had I been trained in smelting administratium alloys instead of in tech, politics, math, and journalism, I suppose I could have let it expire and played dumb. I mean, they burned the guy 500 years ago. Some paperwork errors along the way are to be expected.

Of course it’s not really JMU’s fault this is taking so long. It is not the top of the agenda for the associate vice president, or the associate dean, of the two tech guys, or the web expert, although I suspect it might be for the administrative assistant, because somebody has to run the university while the administrators go to task force meetings.

I apologize to any participants I left out of the previous paragraph. I’m sure I missed someone. And I concede that it’s partially my fault for retiring in the middle of a pandemic and forgetting to tell the powers that be the difference between administration and technology. (Hint: One of them has to work.)

I really want this to be funny. And in isolation, taking six weeks to transfer a URL is funny. But in the context of an administrative apparatus that is still trying to figure out parking, HVAC, and social distancing, it’s a symptom of something larger. At least they have football.

A part of me wants to re-up the URL, eat the $17.99 and worry about it again next year. Another part wants to send them a consultant bill: $75 for a computer consultant, $100 for a business analyst, depending on which hat I’m wearing that day. Maybe a surcharge for changing hats. That’s gotta take at least a tenth of an hour, right?

All this is something I could have ignored if a JMU administrator hadn’t gotten snippy with me about the speed of the transfer for the place I no longer work for.

“I have shit to do,” they snapped.

So did I. But I had to write this first.