The Crazies Are Out.

Or at least they’re calling me on the phone.  I’ve been holed up in more meetings than is typical over the last few days, and have only been able to talk to a handful of website customers.  And yet every single one of them has been at least a little nutty.  I just checked, and it’s not even a full moon.  Apparently the moon is currently in the “waxing gibbous” phase.  Whatever that means.

Mrs. Barron is an elderly woman from the south who needs a website to promote her book describing the various ways that the Constitution violates her rights.  She can’t spell her way out of a wet paper bag, but she has, apparently, written a book. She attempts to mask the fact that she can’t distinguish a URL from a SUV by raising her voice, and E-NUN-CI-A-TING all of her syllables very precisely.  And she likes to repeat the phrase “the crux of the matter is” without ever really identifying exactly what the crux of the matter actually is.

Joe lives in a trailer in Rhode Island and has a couple of websites that he’s built for Jesus. Oddly he’s chosen to feature pictures of his trailer throughout his website.  One of the addresses for one of his website has something to do with living with Jesus.  I pointed the site out to a coworker who asked, “He lives with Jesus?  In that?” He’s posted videos of himself rambling on and on about how Jesus rules.  In these video’s he’s wearing a baseball cap and t-shirt covered with the word JESUS over and over again.  And he sells hand painted Jesus t-shirts that feature a large yellow smiley face with the word Jesus below.

Tara is hoping to start a successful online store to sell footwares (sic), but was only planning on spending $23 over the course of a year for the care and feeding of her website. When she learns that $23 is the monthly cost for hosting an online store, she hesitates.  I’d love to think that she had put together a full business plan and had used the $23 figure to help calculate some long-term financial projections for her start-up business, but frankly I suspect that she may have been a little drunk.

Victor is a talented painter who can’t figure out how to create a new page today, even though he’s created a website with at least a dozen pages already.  When I offer to remote into his computer so that I can show him, he is unable to type in the website address of the site that will allow us to connect.  When I send him a link to the website in an email, he is unable to figure out how to check his email.  Eventually he gives up and tries to sell me a painting.

I talked to a man once who was having trouble designing his own website because his mouse had gotten to the edge of the desk and he needed to move it further to the right.  I told him he needed a bigger desk.

My coworker R spoke with a man who complained that he couldn’t edit his site because he couldn’t find his mouse.  R, who has patience for days, suggested that the man follow one of the chords from his computer.  Then he listened for the next few minutes as the man crawled under his desk, mumbling all the while, and eventually successfully traced back one of the chords, only to report that the chord was connected to a printer.  After he had dusted himself off and was sitting in front of his computer again, the customer remembered that his grandson had come over the day before and installed a chordless mouse.  “Now where would that be?” the man wondered.  And then he asked R to describe what a wireless mouse looks like.

It’s not always glamorous work.  But it’s rarely boring.

image from:  http://digital-lifestyles.info