why telecommuting is hard.

I do work in an office, but far away from the rest of my department. Sometines, it is aggravatingly difficult to make a simple point over any of the various communication methods we have available.

Such as today, when I'm trying to make the word "Étoile" in a template on our content management system ...

Me: The special characters are not working inside the page headers, which make the titles.

Distant Coworker: Check this link out i found when i googled "special charcter html". http://www.utexas.edu/learn/html/spchar.html

Me: Yeah, that's what I mean. They aren't working. It's just displaying the code.

DC: You are using capital E. E /= e. [non-web people note: this means "E does not equal e"]

Me: That's how you get a capital E with an accent over, É

DC: Lower case e.

Me: That makes a lower case e with an accent. For upper case E with accent it's ampEacute; [amp should be &, but I can't figure out why the pre tag won't work here. maybe I'm not as smart as I think.]

DC: You're trying to change the title right?

Me: Yes.

DC: The code is actually right but rather it is not working inside the page header.

Me: Right, that's exactly what I'm saying.

(All respect to my coworkers. I'm saying it's very difficult to get people to understand. Also this is probably remotely interesting to about maybe ... nobody who reads this thing. Hi Mom!)