You’ve heard this one, I’m sure: “Lack of preparedness on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

Whoops, I’m terribly sorry. It turns out that lack of preparedness on someone else’s part does, in fact, constitute an emergency on my part. This afternoon I enjoyed the dubious pleasure of running around dealing with the fact that Metro Networks changed the entire website delivery system for up-to-the-minute traffic info… and didn’t tell anyone beforehand. Just one short email with the new URL, instructions and (it turns out) new passwords would have saved me all sorts of stress.

Oh, yeah. They insisted at first that the “current” passwords would work fine. Bzzzzt.

Then I find out that their new website looks like crap in both Internet Explorer and Firefox. In one, the text is too big and the text window too small, so one has to scroll sideways to read an entire line of text. In the other, the text window is black text on a black background. That’s rather useless, wouldn’t you agree? The solution in both browsers is to click on a tiny, unlabeled icon that launches the text document itself in a dedicated window, nicely unformatted for ease of use.

The entire new system is so counterintuitive as to be nigh-useless, and I fully expect phone calls tomorrow morning from show producers and air talents who’re confused and upset. I won’t be able to blame them one bit, either.

So in among all of the other fun stuff going on right now (do the names Sarbanes and Oxley ring any bells?) I get to find a geek-fu solution to this little nightmare. Wonderful.