today has been a fairly poor day.
for the last week, i have been attempting to help one of our clients with a wordpress site. it is horribly out of date, generally poorly maintained, and i boggled to see how jacked up the back end was with redundant drafts, scads of unmarked entries, and what appears to be several nested installations within the root directory.
the client had requested a ‘squeeze page’ be inserted in a post. normally, this is as simple as inserting a form and redirecting on submit to the appropriate file location. but, as it turns out and for unknown reasons, the host doesn’t allow any redirection not explicitly contained within the wordpress hierarchy and all attempts to finagle my way around it met with the usual 404 error.
so, after a week, i suggested we simply set the files up at the client’s shopping cart with $0.00 as the price and the obligatory billing information could capture the information. problem solved, yes?
er, no. the client was dead set on having the item in a page, with a form and submit button redirecting to the files they were looking to ‘give away’. when asked why, they replied that they wanted to avoid people canceling out of the download. when i explained you can’t keep someone from canceling out of the request, they said, ‘well, this way, if they cancel when they see what they’re getting, we still have their email address.’
i tried to explain that the shopping cart setup where they can see what they’re getting first and must elect to ‘continue to checkout’ would likely increase the chances of them getting the information they were after… but no, they were insistent.
so, ok… i request they please tell me where they wish the files hosted, since redirect on submit will not work with how they currently have the domain configured.
the response? well, that i obviously don’t know what i’m doing and maybe they should just see about getting someone else to do it.
by this time, i was more than happy to agree… and very politely, if not tersely, told them so.
so… a pretty crap day on the work front. and then, tonight, the conversation with my daughter a few days ago finally sunk in deep enough for me to realize something…
my daughter is avoiding having me meet her friends or her fella because she is ashamed of me.
this was a pensive thought for me to have….particularly in light of the fact that much of the situation i’m currently in rose as a direct result of giving up everything so she wouldn’t be at risk for the experience of homelessness and general life implosion that has been my constant state of being for the last… oh… seven years.
she is ashamed to have her friends or fella meet me because she can’t bring them to some nice, well furnished house. she is ashamed because i am not the same, highly successful, well paid professional that i used to be. she is ashamed because she thinks all the materials things i lack are important to her… the image and the appearances and the whole keeping up with the jones’.
she is ashamed. of me.
and i am torn between anger and hurt for it. hurt, mostly. the anger is for circumstances neither of us could have hoped to control.
i wish it were possibly for me to be someone she could be proud of… that she could be proud of the fact that i didn’t just… crack under it all. that she could be proud of how i never abandoned her, never wished she weren’t there, never once was anything other than grateful, thankful… that she was part of my life.
but most of all, i wish she were someone who could understand what being ashamed of me says about her friends and her fella… and i suppose to some degree, of her as well.
i have never been ashamed of her until now.
a very pensive thought indeed.