OK, so you wanna know about computer stress?

You know, as I hear stories from people about computer and gadget stress, it just verifies the fact that I will probably never run out of material for this blog, the seminar system that I have created or the podcast shows that I present to you here. I’ll give you an example of this. My wife is a web support geek. She has a client that puts the raw page together, headers, fields, colors ect, then Pat takes over and does everything else. She sets up the stores, creates the newsletters, does all of the updates, she even does some HTML coding, and then does tutorials for the owner of the web page so they can understand how and why their web page does what it does. So, imagine our surprise when we decided to use Wordpress to blog with and ran straight into………….. a brick wall. Well, so to speak.

Wordpress is huge for bloggers. It has a very large support community, and boasts a lot of great things going for it. Pat and I had some pre-conceptions about the program. We have used Frontpage for a few years and have found it to be very easy to use, intuitive and balanced, although it is now getting old, and Microsoft has stopped making it, we have enjoyed using Frontpage very much. Wordpress on the other hand was, well, an interesting and unique adventure in head scratching.
Things just weren’t going the way we thought they would, and we would solve one issue, only to be faced with another. I turned to the Wordpress forums for help and found an interesting comment that stated one poor fellow spent 12 days on the very same thing that we were suffering from.
Now, to be fair we are newbies to Wordpress and did not know what to expect. But, the good news is that we have two very well written books on the subject and we followed the instructions at least 6 times with the same result. It still didn’t work.
My wife was ready to walk away from it and just go to an entirely new blogging software platform, but I reminded her that as technically based people, we can’t just walk away and use something else. We had to make it work, period. We are in for the long haul, and that means that even though this program is causing us stress and tension now, its up to us to conquer it. Now tell me something. What about all of the people that don’t want to conquer it? They will walk away, perhaps throw their Wordpress books in the trash can and vow never to go anywhere near Wordpress or anything that looks like Wordpress again. That’s just human nature. We get frustrated, tense, angry and a bunch of other emotions that roll around inside our heads and our bodies and that can stay with us.
I am reminded about one of our family members several years ago. I went over to her house and set up her e-mail for her. I had previously done quite a bit of remote computing for her over the internet using a program called ‘PCAnywhere’ and it worked quite well. I thought she was all set after I set up her e-mail and I left and told her that if she needed my help I could do another remote access session.
She ran into a bit of trouble with a fairly simple program and got so upset that she told me she could not sleep for 3 days. Imagine not getting proper rest for 3 full days. Stress, tension, anger, frustration you name it, she had it.
Computer stress is real. Its here, and for many people its going to be an ongoing challenge for some time to come. I am going to put together a podcast about computer stress and what users go through. You very well may recognize yourself in this upcoming podcast. Enjoy, Rick.