If the good Lord is willing and the creek don’t rise
I’m not sure I should be posting this yet. But, I’ll knock on wood.
We’re in the middle of a migration. We are upgrading a key program on our agents’ computers. The migration started last week. We are continuing this week and we’ll finish up next week.
We’ve been planning this migration for six months. In fairness, three of those months were “on hold” because of COVID. But, it’s been a long time.
The real challenge has been to upgrade software that is sitting on computers in people’s homes. In addition, we needed a solution that didn’t require a lot of time from our agents and didn’t require our agents to become IT experts.
We came up with a solution about two weeks ago. Our engineers did. We tested it and it did everything we needed it to. The agents only need to log in to start the migration. We built in checks to help us identify if something goes wrong.
The first week we did one site in North Carolina. It went off perfectly. This week we are doing a site in Utah and one in Alabama. Next week we do the last two sites.
And so far so good. The migrations have gone exactly as we planned them.
Are you superstitious? Do you know if you are?
Do you ever “knock on wood”?
Do you know why?
Generally, it’s something we say (and do) when we don’t want anything to go wrong.
The migration is going well. Knock on wood.
It’s just a saying, right? I mean it’s like the one I posted at the beginning.
Hopefully we’ll finish the migration without any issue. If the good Lord is willing and the creek don’t rise.
But, they aren’t the same. One is superstitious, one is not.
knocking on wood is an ancient tradition. It’s religous, mystic even. Ancient cultures such as the Celts and the Druids believed spirits lived in trees. Knocking on the wood calls forth the spirit to assist you in whatever you are trying to do.
So, when I say, “The migration is going well. Knock on wood,” I’m really asking the spirit in the wood to come out and help my migration go well.
And, of course we are afraid to say something good, like “the migration is going well” for fear that we will jinx it. And that is also superstitious, of course. Not surprisingly it originated with baseball players, one of the most superstitious group of people in the history of sports.
We use an ancient superstition to combat a modern one.
Tomorrow we continue our migration. Knock on wood. Hopefully it continues to go well. If the good Lord is willing and the creek don’t rise.
Stay safe
Rodney M Bliss is an author, columnist and IT Consultant. His blog updates every weekday. He lives in Pleasant Grove, UT with his lovely wife, thirteen children and grandchildren.
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