The VM Update That Almost Ended Me (and Then I Made 10 Cold Calls Anyway)
Running a one-man web shop means there’s no “not my department.” Today was a perfect example — and yeah, it’s Monday, so of course it started like this.
Part 1: The Nightmare
Woke up (or never really went to sleep, depending on how you count it) to find one of my machines in a full-blown virtual machine update nightmare. You know the kind — everything was fine yesterday, you let an update run, and suddenly you’re staring at a VM that won’t cooperate and a sinking feeling that today’s plans just got hijacked.
The actual culprit this time? An old Visual Basic script that needed updating to play nice again. Anyone who’s kept a business running for 30 years knows exactly what this is like — there’s always some quietly load-bearing piece of legacy code sitting in the corner, doing its job for years, until an update comes along and reminds you it’s still there.
So that was the morning: digging back into old VB code, figuring out what broke, patching it up, and getting the machine back on its feet.
Part 2: Then I Just… Went to Work
Here’s the thing about running your own shop — you don’t get a day off just because your morning turned into a computer crisis. So once the machine was breathing again, I pivoted straight into lead gen mode: 10 cold calls to potential new clients.
No fanfare, no big production. Just picked up the phone and started dialing after wrestling a VM back to life. That’s the actual job — not glamorous, but that’s how SolarBlu keeps moving.
The Monday Tax
Only Monday, and already a full VM crisis plus a round of cold calls. If this is the opening act, the rest of the week better be paying attention.
The Takeaway
Some days are “fix the ancient script that’s holding everything together” days. Some days are “get on the phone and find new business” days. Today was both, back to back, no break in between. That’s freelance web life — you’re sysadmin, developer, and salesperson before lunch, and nobody’s coming to save you if the VM doesn’t boot.
Tomorrow it’ll probably be something else entirely. That’s kind of the fun of it.