A week of wrestling tech, tools, and a cold that tried to finish me

Some weeks are smooth. This one felt like running customer operations and digital marketing and manual labour… while someone stuffed my head with damp cotton wool. If you’ve ever tried to type a CSV formula while sneezing so hard you nearly headbutted the keyboard — you get it.

The Tradify Saga (or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love SVC-)

If there was an Olympic sport for arguing with software, I’d be on the podium.

This week I:

• fought Tradify’s new UI

• fought CSV imports

• fought product codes

• fought logic that made less sense than the plot of Fast & Furious 9

• and finally figured out why everything kept defaulting to £0

I swear I aged three years. At one point, I stared at the screen thinking:

“Am I the problem?” Then I realised—no. The button literally said ‘Enter Price’ like it was mocking me personally. It was like assembling IKEA furniture with instructions written by a drunk squirrel.

Trying to do marketing while melting

Nothing says “professional content creator” like filming an Instagram reel while sounding like a broken Dyson.

This week I produced:

• an empty-room BNI hype post

• an eero install post

• a Shed Seven / Sonos setup post

• and about 20 drafts that will never see daylight because I coughed halfway through all of them

Every time I hit record:

sniff

“Hey everyone—”

ACHOO

“Right. Delete.”

The brain fog

Running all the usual stuff — customer jobs, UW switches, Facebook posts, price lists, Nextdoor updates — while your head feels like it’s full of warm gravy is a unique experience. Some highlights:

• I tried to upload a photo to Instagram and accidentally sent it to a random Dropbox folder from 2019

• I typed a 15-digit alphanumeric product code wrong FIVE times

• I forgot what day it was, twice

• At one point, I genuinely thought:
  “What if the CSV is right and the universe is wrong?”

The cold vs. the workflow

There’s nothing quite like trying to build a full digital pricing system while your sinuses are acting like they’re on strike.

Apparently:

• sneezing doesn’t fix Tradify

• coughing doesn’t fix Facebook Commerce

• blowing your nose doesn’t refresh product images

• and paracetamol doesn’t import a CSV properly

Who knew?

What I learned

Even when you feel like a damp tissue with legs, you can still:

• fix people’s Wi-Fi

• sort their broadband

• build a few decent posts

• restructure a product list

• and argue with software until it submits out of fear.