By Ann Voorhees Baker*
I publish an online newspaper called Woodstock Generation Women’s News, a curated conglomeration of content of interest to women of the 60’s and 70’s. I’ve been doing it for quite some time, but I haven’t pointed it out to anyone because I couldn’t access it about a year ago.
For some reason, I could not log into my account and make updates. So today, miraculously, I was able to do so, and the reason is that I simply wrote to the company that manages the publishing program and told them I couldn’t get in. Actual humans wrote back — hurrah. And they solved the problem, which up until then had not been fixable with a ‘forgot my password’ type of process. I think that a year ago I temporarily gave up on my newspaper because I never considered the old-fashioned ‘hey, you guys, this isn’t working’ approach. I simply tried all the usual steps of their system, several times over, got frustrated, and threw up my hands.
The lesson is that sometimes it’s worth breaking the fourth wall, to borrow a term from the theater when an actor breaks the imaginary wall at the front of the stage and speaks directly to the audience as himself, not his character. Sometimes when the whole beautiful program or platform just gets messed up, or you mess it up, it’s time to break that fourth wall and exit the system entirely and contact the humans who built it and say ‘what the heck.’ I suppose this has become much more natural for me to do, thanks to my years of web designing. In that work, I’ve learned that I can — usually, at least — find the online forum for a theme or plugin that I’m using when I get totally stumped, and communicate with the people who created it. I ask them how to do something I want to do, or to tell me what I might have done wrong.
It’s so amazing, really — to have a 12-hour-delayed running conversation with Priyanka who’s in India, and we’re talking about my website and her company’s program and she’s giving me a snippet of code to add to the custom CSS (cascading style sheets) field of my theme so that I can hide the breadcrumbs at the tops of my pages. I love thinking about how Priyanka and I are on two sides of the planet, in opposing time zones, and we speak two very different native languages, and yet we’re engaged in the same enterprise in the same way, and we’re talking with each other about it, and I’m supporting her a bit by buying their program and she’s supporting me a bit by examining my little challenge and solving it for me. It’s sweet. It’s pacifist. It gives me hope about the connectedness of the human race and the basic sameness of us all. It makes me believe that almost all of us want, really, the same thing — to go about our work and our meals and our families and to be basically decent to one another.
CSS (cascading style sheets) image from Wikipedia
One of my favorite moments of sweetness was when I watched a screen-capture video tutorial made by guy who was, I think, Pakistani, and he had a deep melodic voice as he showed how to create a new PHP (PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language) file for a custom footer. He said gently, “You type in the code just like this, isn’t it?” … “And so when you finish this step, you will see that the left block of text displays as you want, isn’t it?”
I could hear children playing distantly outside his window. I wanted to cry.
©2016 Ann Voorhees Baker for SeniorWomen.com
*Ann Voorhees Baker is Founder and Producer of Women At Woodstock, an online community and annual national gathering that provides information, inspiration and practical tools for women 50 and over who are striving to make their futures exactly what they want them to be. Ann is a website designer, social media marketing and search engine optimization specialist, and writer. She writes regularly for the Women At Woodstock blog and for Roommates4Boomers, the roommate-matching service for women over 50.
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