Pay Attention to Detail

The Eight of Cups is the card of the skilled craftsperson, if not yet the master. So this is someone who is quite knowledgeable in their field with a strong foundation and an awareness of detail, yet this person is still learning. Ideally, aren’t we all? With that in mind, this card can also represent a person or situation where the focus is on learning. For example, most students are returning to their studies this week after the long holiday break.  Myself, I have a training day where we are learning some useful Unix commands.

The Eight of Cups came up reversed for me today. The main thing I’m getting from this is to stay alert and pay attention to detail. This is good advice for everyone now that Mercury has gone retrograde, which can slow down the mental faculties and cause miscommunication and misunderstandings.  In turn, that can lead to anything from minor annoyance to total disaster.

I don’t know how much you now about Unix (I’m guessing most of you are quite happy knowing nothing about it) but the commands are a lot more powerful than Microsoft operating systems.  Using Windows, I think we’ve all accidentally deleted a file or folder but, unless you were really persistent, you were probably able to retrieve it.

On a Unix system there is no net. Delete the wrong files in the wrong folder you can do some serious damage. Our trainer today told a story where he did just that, wiping out all the training material from a two year period by deleting everything in the wrong directory. Fortunately, there was a copy (not by design) on a server in another country. But it could have been worse—we could be working with nuclear reactors instead of telecommunication software. Now there are some details you really don’t want to get wrong.

Be careful out there!