Counter Intelligence

Despite what the group Three Dog Night sang to you, they were wrong.  One is not the loneliest number.  It's zero.

As I mentioned the other day, Elisberg Inudstries has seemingly hit a patch recently, and for seven days in a row had over 1,000 "unique visitors" a day, for each day.  The streak hit eight in a row on Tuesday, but came to an end yesterday.  Or did it...?

Yesterday, Igor Gsaliva, accounts receivable, reported that the site counter says that we had welcomed 791 visitors for the day somewhere between 10 and 11 PM.  But that was it -- no one else wandered in for the rest of the evening.  I was surprised, but...hey, people have their many choices.

But that surprised didn't compare to the one thing morning when I checked in with our accounting department.  How bad was it?  Well, let's put it this way -- it's now 2 o'clock in the afternoon on the East Coast, and our statistics counter is showing...zero.  Not a single visitor all day. 

I know that one's writing can be a bit inconsistent at times, but this is going from the sublime to the ridiculous.  People couldn't be that put out reading about Eric Cantor, great baseball throws and opera satire...

Mind you, I do understand that it's possible.  Sort of like a sci-fi movie about the apocalypse.  But the previous week, the counter showed that there had been around 9,000 page views, so to go from that to...zero -- well, you can imagine it was a bit of a surprise.  And so I had to figure unlikely, discounting that world "apocalypse" theory,

After a few queries to my website provider, they wrote back that, indeed, there is a problem, are aware of it, and are working hard to resolve things.  Whether they'll include past numbers once fixed, who knows.  But I have to figure that the issue happened last night, between 10 PM and 11 PM -- that's when the counter jammed at 791.

None of this means anything to any readers, of course, but you can at least understand my bewilderment and shock when I checked in this morning.  It felt like going into busy department store and seeing no one in the halls when you shout out, "Hello -- o - o - o- o!!!  Is anybody there -- there -- there -- there -- there?"

(And no, I didn't start singing from 1776 -- "Does anybody care?  Does anybody see what I see??!!"

Anyway, hopefully this will be resolved soon, and hopefully it will show that people are, indeed, actually traipsing around the hallway, still reading the regular yammerings.  For all I know, though, the refrigerator will have been raided and some of the silverware missing.  Not to worry, you've put up with a lot, so I can deal with it...

But really, zero is far lonelier than one.