Contact
Let’s talk about this page, the Contact Plum page, the one you were hoping would make all your dreams come true. Sorry about that. The mysterious digital grape on my website vine, the little widget that’s supposed to—how do the kids say it?—juice your words into my inbox. Spoiler: it's not juicing. In fact, it’s about as alive as a petrified raisin right now, which is why I’m here, grinning sheepishly at my screen and weighing the age-old question: How many times can one person ask their younger (yet increasingly larger) brother for tech support before said brother begins to bill you in embarrassing childhood stories at Thanksgiving?
Look, here's where I lay my tech cards on the coffee table. I know about as much HTML as I do about quantum physics, which is to say, if the instructions don’t have glitter with them, I’m checked out. If someone handed me a codebase, I’d probably try to Smell the Glove—the Metallica album of coding—and hope for inspiration by osmosis. My contribution to debugging is mostly pressing the refresh button with dangerous levels of conviction.
Here’s the thing—a secret between me and the three-and-a-half people reading this: Once upon a time (definition of "once" being “a vague Thursday” and "time" being when I was stress-eating Nutella straight from the jar) this thing totally worked. You could type words, sentences, poorly-disguised Shakespearean sonnets about your dog—BOOM!—those deliciously weird texts would drift, like majestic digital pigeons, right into my inbox.
Now? Crickets. Possibly dead crickets. All I know is, you hit submit and the message goes Where Emails Fear to Tread (i.e. nowhere), and this—friends, countrymen, descendants of my grandmother’s meatball legacy—annoys me. Because this means I am forced to resort to my exasperatingly competent, gentle giant of a brother. He who, at 6’3”, could squish me as easily as he squishes software bugs, but only threatens to throw me a nostalgic wedgie if I call him during D&D night.
Sigh. Is this what adulthood is? Performing interpretive dance moves with your hands over the keyboard while yelling “Do the computer magic!” and someone maybe fifteen years younger coughnotactually, just fixes it while drinking something called “lizard sauce” (I wish I were joking but he’s into health now).
By the way, this is not a request for coding help. This is a request for patience. Or perhaps, solidarity. Heck, maybe just someone to high-five me over the internet, or silently judge me as someone whose solution to “Contact Form Not Submitting” was to unplug the wifi, whisper a hopeful ritual ("Great Marmalade, bless this web server…"), and then plug it back in.
So, yes. The Contact Plum Page is under construction. Like most of my life, really, except the digital version doesn't come with mood lighting or self-soothing Spotify mixes. Sit tight, beautiful internet passerby. My brother has promised me (cross his dietary supplements and hope to cry) to take a look.
Maybe, just maybe... someday soon, you can click submit and know your priceless wisdom will find me. Or a haiku about raccoons. Either way, there will be a victory lap and it will definitely involve Nutella.
Until then—slide into my DMs and tell me your quirks, or send your compliments via interpretive meme.
Technology, am I right?