Midlife Computing Crisis Narrowly Averted
In the continuing struggle to regain control of my blog from the evil Word Press upgrade that ate it alive, I confess, I broke down. I called for help. Since no human being is available to talk at Word Press, at least not that I could find, I called the support team at my webhost, hostmonster. Even though Word Press 2.8’s failure to work was not their problem, I hoped someone on their team could talk me through a solution, perhaps reloading the old version of Word Press if that seemed best.
It took the young man literally less than three minutes after taking my password to say, “I can see your website dashboard just fine,” which of course made me want to tear my hair out.
“HOW can you see it if I can’t?”
“Well,” he asked, calm as a pumpkin, “what browser are you using?”
Are you kidding me? BROWSER? It’s not my browser! It’s Word Press. Or so I thunk. But I did as he asked and downloaded Firefox.
Guess what? I can see my blog just peachy keen in Firefox. And Chrome. And Safari. But not in Internet Explorer.
“WHY?” I asked. “What happened? And why aren’t forty million other Word Press users who use IE freaking out like I was?”
“I don’t know.” That seemed to satisfy him.
This strikes me as infinitely wacky. Is that just because I’m over 40 and simply too old to accept the quirky jitters of computers? I did my own computer programming training on punch cards, I admit. It was a time when If/Then statements always made sense. When 1+1=2 all the time, every time. And if something went wrong with a computer, well, it was for some sort of reason. It might take twenty solid hours to figure out that reason, but a reason existed. Programs were a thing of beauty. They fit. They worked. They made sense.
And of course my problem–and it is a life problem, some would say–is that I want to know why. It’s asking “why” about the stuff of life that drives me to write. It drives a lot of my life decisions. My young techno-helper’s peace with his “I don’t know” stopped me short.
Dude, I thought, I wanna be like you.
So I’ve learned a lesson. I won’t ever again spend a week trying to figure technological things out on my own. I’m a novelist, not a computer whiz. And I’ll call for help earlier. And keep that hosting service, God love ‘em. They know the meaning of customer service, even for a middle aged broad like me!
Yeah. I had the browser problem a few years back with WordPress. IE browsers had to scroll down to see my entries due to a weird IE interpretation of WP columns. Since then I have had to completely re-install WP and reverted to an older edition temporarily. Still wanting to get out of WP entirely and design from scratch like I did when I first began blogging years ago.
I also relate to your need to know “why.” The only difference is that I am at peace having a sort of broad understanding. This is probably related to the fact that I have been a dumb artist type for years.
So I don’t need to know how my new computerized carburetor actually mixes air and gasoline to combust. Just that it does. They still do that don’t they?
I find young people’s lack of awareness of the immediate history of technology (and of course history in general) more troubling. I once was being trained by a young IT person a decade or so ago who did not recognize all kinds of internet techie stuff because it was a prior generation (e.g. FTP, telnetting). I found that a bit disconcerting.
It’s kind of funny: when I think about it, I don’t really need to know “why” about computers. It’s more that my early training (yes, in the 80s, when I was still a youngster) about computers making sense still kicks in after all these years! My expectations are 30 years old! Evidently I imprinted them, like a little duckling deciding the first thing it sees is its mother, and I can’t shake it. Yet.