The other day I was tinkering with a random test site and was driven to near madness. Why? I kept forgetting to add the ending semicolon. Every single time. It wasn’t that I would miss the key stroke it was that I just legit didn’t press the thing.
I spent a minute or two every time I would press enter to try and run what I was doing and it would give me a new line. Nothing would happen and I would just stare at the command line. Like, what did I just do? Why isn’t it returning what I know should be returned? Why was I forgetting the simple thing to enter the semicolon at the end of my statement? You’d think after the first 10 times I would have realized, right?
No.
I still did it an hour later and that’s when I realized that I really wasn’t pressing the button. That damned key. My finger just didn’t want to press it. It was afraid of it. It ran from it.
Okay, but really it was because I forgot what I was actually doing and where it was begin done on. I was futzing around with random MySQL queries on the command line and I would forget the ending semicolon.
Yeah. I really did get so used to using a GUI tool that I nearly forgot the syntax. This is now me sighing. This is now me laughing because it really was a simple a mistake that can easily be missed and forgotten. Now, granted it took me 2 hours to retrain my brain to do that but that’s 2 hours of muscle memory that will be super useful down the line.