Alice, Robert, and WordPress
Prologue – WordPress
Alice and Robert are my father’s parents. They never knew what WordPress was. My grandfather’s technical sophistication ended in turning on the screen of the desktop my father had purchased for him years ago. But as they crossed into their 90s, WordPress would come to be instrumental in their lives and mine.
WordPress found me in 2009. A good friend said I needed to learn this new thing that could “change our lives”. Their partner was using it as a Virtual Assistant…and she worked from home full time!
Technology interested me from an early age. I was inspired by the works of Aldous Huxley, the Beatniks, and Magick, as well as the science fiction of Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick. The moment I was able to install WordPress and create a functional website in five minutes without any coding knowledge, it felt like a whole new world had opened up and we now had the power to shape it how we wanted.
That same week, I built my first WordPress site for someone else.
Like a friend who can’t help but show off their newest card trick, I was eager to demonstrate my “website-building skills” to all my friends and family.
It was through this process that I gained experience and began to appreciate the connection between our passions and having the ability to pursue them.
I also saw the websites as a canvas on which I could create art. My previous high water mark as a child was a slanted stick figure that when I showed my grandmother, the look of horror on her face even as she said, “what a wonderful artist!”, will always stick with me.
I continued to build WordPress sites in my free time for anyone who would take one from me but didn’t have the time, the resources, or the skills.
My career at the time was in Sports Medicine. This involved finding tools to manage training staff, athletes, and facilities. I came up against technology that we couldn’t afford or didn’t allow us the flexibility needed to control our businesses and our client’s health outcomes.
As a result in 2011, I began my first serious WordPress project when I was head of the training and rehabilitation departments for the Gold’s Gym locations in Seattle proper. The ownership group owned all seven facilities in the city. I worked out of the main gym in Kirkland, WA, where the executives who ran the Seattle tech companies, like Google and Amazon, would go back to after their office hours ended.
As gyms seldom have tech departments, and ours were no different, I began learning WordPress as a serious designer, if not a developer, to solve problems we were encountering. The initial goal was to add training staff to the company website. That progressed into integrating SaaS products that would help our trainers track and share information with their clients. Finally, it involved switching over all the ownership group’s sites to WordPress.
I put together a multi-site network (thank you WordPress 3.0 🙌) for all seven gyms that they could more easily manage and was more customizable while reducing their cost by $550 per location each month by abandoning the gym-specific website hosting previously used.
Everything went off without a hitch, luckily for everyone! The staff and the membership all loved the new sites!
The ease with which they could manage their memberships, book sessions, and keep engaged with the community when they weren’t at the gym were all huge positives for the business and the members.
Staff who trained clients were also ecstatic! The Kirkland Gold’s Gym is home to high-level athletes, such as professional MMA fighters, Olympic athletes, and bodybuilders. The ease of using WordPress to add users and manage our client’s progress increased the effectiveness of what we were doing and our ability to market our results.
What I took from that experience was the reinforcement of my belief that in an ever more connected world, WordPress, open source, and the ethos behind it all were a means to achieve almost any end. It was also a means achievable by anyone, regardless of class, gender, or skin color.
My grandparents – Alice and Robert
Shortly after in late 2011, I returned to my hometown in the state of Massachusetts. I went back to New England for various reasons, one of the largest was my grandparents’ need for more physical support.
I spent the next 6 years in Massachusetts. As my grandparent’s health continued to deteriorate, Alice’s from leukemia and Robert’s from dementia, I took jobs that paid less but allowed me more time to be there for them. I went from running a friend’s gym to running the training department, to being a trainer, to leaving sports medicine behind completely as the commitments didn’t work anymore.
I worked various jobs for friends who knew my situation and offered as much leniency as they could. One friend owned McLaughlin’s gas station at the bottom of my grandparent’s street, which had a perfect view of their front yard.
I got paid less than minimum wage to sit, talk to people when they came in, pump gas, put air in tires, and be a buffer so the mechanics could get their work done. What I gave up in income, however, I more than made up for in the flexibility of the schedule.
There was often a need for me to leave the gas station immediately after a rueful call from one of my grandparents.
The time between the phone call and unlocking their front after sprinting up the street was usually around 90 seconds or fewer.
Sometimes the needs were comical to everyone involved! The most frequent was unlocking the cellar door to let someone out stuck downstairs. Sometimes, that was my grandfather, who had gone down and shut the door behind him. Usually, it was my grandmother. My grandfather would forget after a minute that she had gone into the cellar, and if he saw the door ajar while sneaking a cookie out of the cookie jar because my grandmother was away, he would close the door and then go back to his rocking chair in the other room.
They began taking the phone with them everywhere they went in the house. Each time they would get locked in the basement I would hustle home, let them out, and we’d all have a good laugh about how ridiculous the world was!
Everything completely changed when my grandparents were in a car accident. My grandfather got confused driving about 50 feet back across the street, returning from taking my grandmother to the bank, as she could no longer walk there. They were both banged up in the crash, my grandmother severely.
At the rehab facility after discharge from the hospital the doctors determined my grandparents couldn’t go back to their home unless they had full-time care. Our family decided I would quit my gas station job and stay at the house with my grandfather until my grandmother returned, by then having put in place professional nursing services for them.
The week before my grandfather came home, I’d set up a WordPress website on Pressable hosting called “Unofficial Alan Moore”. I’ve been a fan of darker and offbeat comics and art since I could remember and have been supporting Alan Moore, and the global Arts Lab Project of Northampton, UK, for years via Kickstarter and fundraising efforts. I viewed my website as a great place to share the good people, fantastic art, and all these things that filled me with joy while I would be housebound.
But support for my grandparents never came to fruition.
When my grandmother returned and the bills increased, I turned to the only resource I could take advantage of at that moment, my WordPress website.
I changed the name of my fan site, Unofficial Alan Moore, to Emporium Purgatorio. This was a nod to Alan Moore’s and Kevin O’Neill’s eight-part series, Cinema Purgatorio. I installed WooCommerce, then opened an eBay store to gain traction and find inventory for my new business venture. I began purchasing rare and hard-to-find original comics and art at below-market rates. I would then resell or barter them, but instead of maximizing profits I maximized openness and honesty for the art.
This, coupled with my lifetime support and connections with the fantastic artists and writers still creating the works, led me to become the sole US distributor for many Indie projects coming out of the UK.
Over the next two years, I used only WordPress, WooCommerce, Pressable, and Jetpack, to go from my first $50 inventory purchase to selling single comic pages for thousands of dollars, the 2nd largest collection of rare Alan Moore comics in the world, and a global Arts Lab Community that is still thriving today.
Time must continue, though, and it did for my grandfather. After his passing I remained in the house to care for my grandmother. And I’ve never known as deep sorrow as the conversations she and I would have about regrets in life.
What still strikes me is that they were all about adventures not taken, not mistakes she had made. She encouraged me to follow my joy.
When I told her I felt my joy would be to put a tent in a backpack and skateboard across the country, she said, “remember, Mark-Andrew, everything always works out when you’re doing things for the right reasons”. And I have remembered.
Her passing is another singular story. This story ends with our house empty and me determined to remember what my grandmother said. It ends with a belief built on experience that with WordPress, and the community that continues to uplift it, we can make the world better…even if it’s just for one person.
Epilogue
I purchased an ultralight tent and quilt, paired what little belongings I had down to a 30L backpack that weighs 6 1/2 lb with everything I own in the world in it. I made one last stop at my local skate shop, where I’d been going for 30 years, to say goodbye and pick up my new skateboard setup.
The next morning, the familiar creak of the front door as I locked it one last time almost overwhelmed me.
But I took a few deep breaths, put the keys in the mailbox for the realtor, and pushed away down the street towards the west coast 3,300 miles away.
That was years ago now. I’ve been building WordPress websites and hosting them for good humans at no cost, using just my mobile phone, ever since. *Yes, absolutely zero. I don’t charge for my time, I don’t charge for hosting.
While the skateboard is always in my hand or under my feet, and most of the community that knows me by name are skateboarders themselves, what’s allowed me to continue to push wherever I wanted to go, whenever I wanted to go, is WordPress.
I don’t know the number of lives I may have affected. Most of those I’ve built sites for or supported, I don’t know where they are today. Almost all moved on as their businesses and their ideas grew. They take over the work themselves, or hire teams, for what comes next.
I do know every single person I’ve introduced to WordPress has told me they wish they had known about this sooner. They were better off after being introduced to WordPress, and what’s possible when you take control of your own destiny.
I don’t keep track of pretty much anything in life, except the people in front of me and any project I’m undertaking at that moment. I’ve forgotten most of the places I’ve been, and most of the things I’ve seen. But I feel that is as it should be. I feel fulfilled and ecstatic almost every moment.
And the thing that continues to allow me to just let go, to just be what I feel is my most authentic self, is WordPress. So, thank you. 🙂❤️
.