I had a problem, and it was getting worse.

About a week ago, our jobs stopped ingesting. Well, not quite stopped completely, but trickled to a much smaller amount than usual. Every morning, instead of jobs uneventfully appearing on ZenSearch, I received an error email.

When the first one arrived, I was pretty confident. There were clear instructions for how to fix the issue, which I followed. I was certain the problem would be gone with the next ingestion.

I was wrong.

With each day, I became more concerned. Consulting with "Claude" provided more options to try, which I diligently did. I added wait times between intake attempts. I added jitter. I added 3rd party libraries. Things I only had a vague understanding of.

Each time, I thought I had beaten it, only to receive the dreaded error email.

This went on for a week, cranking up the tension day by day. I couldn't stop thinking about it. I was even losing sleep.

By Sunday, I was so desperate that I would have done anything to fix it. Anything. Begging, crying, begging and crying.

As it turns out, I didn't have to resort to begging or crying.

I discovered the source of the problem. It was a financial oversight. In the transition from co-founder to solo founder, a low-balance notification had slipped through the cracks. All it took to fix my horrible pain was a $5 deposit into our OpenAI account.

Boom! A week of misery was gone in under 2 minutes.

Did I celebrate the win?

If you read any of my posts, you know I TALK about celebrating wins quite a bit. So did I?

A little. But not like I should have. Not like I encourage everyone else to.

Why? Because I'm human, and a work in progress. I want to be positive. I want to appreciate. I want to celebrate. I mean to.

It's SO EASY to say "whew, that's done," and move on to another task, another issue. So easy to push aside the achievement and focus on the next problem. So easy to diminish the win. "All I did was make a $5 payment" —yup, I thought that.

It's SO HARD to let the positives shine. But I need to acknowledge and savor those moments of awesomeness and cherish the wins to get through the hard parts. And so do you.

I fixed a big problem. Not with code or anything fancy, but it's fixed nonetheless. An accomplishment that deserves my recognition and appreciation.

Monday morning, when the new jobs were ingested without incident, there were more than our max could count, making up for the lost days. Returning us to normal. And that is certainly a win worth celebrating! So I did!

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