I opened up my mail box, and that ugly flame was staring at me again. It was a message from our previous hosting company's - and local monopoly's - head tech, telling me that all the problems we had with a mass DNS switch were my fault because I hadn't (as our systems guy said) 'written it out in crayon'. I can kind of understand where he's coming from in a way; we knew what we wanted to have happened and he had to rely on second hand info. Thing is, I didn't have time to tell him how to do his job. Granted it was a lot of domains to be moved, 34 in total, but that's still no excuse, in my mind. Another thing is that the way he set them up in the first place was only ok as a quick hack, but I would have assumed that he would have fixed them so they would work in the long term. Especially considering the other company is still being paid by our clients to host the client's domains. Having 34 domains that we don't own c-named to one that we do just seems wrong to me. I kind of expected that when I told them that they could drop our domains from their zones, they wouldn't drop their own client's domains as well.

So, I read through this stupid mail again and it bothers me a lot. The guy was downright nasty. So if figure I might as well get it over with, and I write down what comes to my mind. I was actually rather proud of it. I showed it to my manager to make sure I was cleared to send it (as I wasn't very nice to the guy at all), and she laughed and said that it was great. So, without reading it over again, I hit send.

I immediately regretted it.

It wasn't as if they guy read it and hung himself or anything. He hasn't replied to me yet, so I don't even know if he received it. He could even be blocking my address. The thing is that I realized that I was being as nasty as he was, and that it was a very bad thing. I felt like crap. I stewed over it, tried to work on my project but I couldn't keep my mind on it.

So, I figured that I might as well do something about the situation. I sent him another mail apologizing for being rude, telling him that I was a hot-head and that we were both probably really stressed out what had gone down. I presented my points again, but this time as politely as was possible, and I told him to completely disregard the last e-mail.

I don't know if that was the best solution overall. I know that I really did feel sorry, and I probably wouldn't have been able to concentrate if I hadn't done something. I just don't like flame wars, and from the first mail I got, I know I would have been starting one if I hadn't withdrawn at least a little bit.

Now I guess I just have to wait and see what happens.

I hate this part.