OTR Travails

So, this is the part of my job that is less than glamorous. I am sitting here at 10:00pm waiting for my programmers (who are in India) to start their day so that we can discuss the remaining bugs in the site.

I had been warned by several people not to go the India route when I started building the site. How bad could it be? Well… let me tell you. It may be 1/5th of the price, but it will more than cost you in headaches and delays. For seven months now I have been waiting. Thank god for the back-to-back re-runs of Sex and The City that they have started airing at 10:00pm!

It’s not all bad really. When I look at what they have accomplished, I’m actually really happy with the results. But it certainly hasn’t been straightforward. About a year ago I put an add on Craig’s List looking for someone who could handle this whole technology thing… and I got a ton of response. I narrowed it down and found what I thought would be the answer to my problems. Someone who was passionate about travel and who understood that a cookie is something that is dropped onto your hard-drive and not something you crave when you are sitting up at night waiting for the sun to rise in India.

Unfortunately about 2 weeks before our scheduled launch date in June she backed out of the project after having gone through some serious personal issues. I was left with a bunch of HTML garble and a big pit in my stomach. Luckily Seth was just finishing up school at that point and had some time on his hands. He volunteered to do a full-blown search for new programmers while I was up to my ears in planning my next research trip to Guatemala. Kudos to my husband for saving the day and keeping me from throwing in the towel (as he has done many times since then).

The months that followed are a blur. This is me at our beautiful escape in Lake Atitlan, surrounded by some of the most incredible scenery in the world, geeking away on my laptop.

The days were spent researching content and writing up specs for the design of the site and the nights involved finding an internet café that was open late enough for me to get online with the programmers in India. This generally led to several hours of back and forth over what we had agreed on and why I wasn’t going to pay extra for functionality that I had already paid for.

Very long story short, we are finally finished and are now testing the site. Some nights they like to pretend I don’t exist, so I sit here online waiting and they never show up. Ahh the joys! I will be sure to let you know the minute it is up and running.