Thanks to ike’s oldest granddaughter’s perseverance over several months, the ikewest.com website has a new face—and on some pages, new information. Sophie watched her dad, Bryan of Eaglepixel.com, create websites all her growing up years. She figures: why not give it a shot herself. So, to get started, she took on the job of re-doing a simple granny site. And her own gramma’s fit the bill.
With a little help from dad, Sophie pretty much taught herself the right moves, the proper clicks, learning as she went along. No easy feat, as she’s finishing high school, while at the same time, taking community college classes. Bravo, Sophia!
Sophie’s dedication to this particular work goes deeper than her curiosity about the website creation process, and whether or not she could scale the technical walls required to reach the epitome of a well-functioning, attractive internet site. She’s facing graduation, turning eighteen and going out into the world on her own soon. She tosses and turns many nights at the prospect of all that personal transformation, contemplating how to make these transitions smoothly, in a world that “costs a lot of money”, says the kid facing adulthood.
Let’s rewind even further back in time. Towards the end of my six-month exile in Greece (March – August 2020), I fielded an email SOS from Sophie at home in Austin. She needed help. She needed a job. Plenty of applications had been tossed out. A few interviews resulted, but she never scored an offer to work. In her youthful mind, Sophie felt certain it was something she had (or had not) done that lead to being passed by in favor of another candidate. She was heartbroken.
“No, no, no,” I assured her. The blame was not to be placed on some lack of her own, but instead, the desperate world situation. At the time, sixty percent of single mom’s in the US didn’t yet have their jobs back from earlier in the year. And those hiring would choose to employ mothers who had children depending on them to put food on the table, roofs over their heads, and so on. In the competition between hiring family breadwinners or teen applicants, the former quickly becomes the obvious choice for newly-selected employees.
Sophie thought about this and lightened up a bit. Then some more, when I offered to interview and pay her to work for me, if we could strike a deal agreeable to both of us. We did. And the first task: update the website. Then together we’ll later branch out and explore other areas of the internet/computing jungle. Low-tech gramma and high-tech grandgal. It’s a team made in heaven. Afterall, in every age, youth need to catapult their dreams for a better world out across the generations. Thank you, Sophia, for sharing your precious time, energy, I’m honored to play a small role in the pursuit of your ambitions.