C is for Computer

I’m old enough to remember a life before computers. I remember drawing squares with an amiga machine plugged into a tv in my last year at primary school. I remember, at high school, seeing a mouse for the first time… My first email account (which I still have, but rarely use) was a hotmail account that I apparently registered on the 17th of October 1997, I didn’t have my own computer… I used to access my mail by popping down to the Whangarei library in my lunch breaks…
I remember doing particularly well at programming in my Computer Science classes in my last year of high school. We were programming in BASIC and Pascal if memory serves me correctly. But no one knew that computers were going to be QUITE so big… and no one thought that encouraging a girl into further study in that field might be a good idea…
So I took the long way round.
I’ve barely documented the three most difficult years I’ve spent here, for good reason, there are sketchy allusions to them dotted around the blog but while I look back on them with varying degrees of chagrin there are elements of that tenure that worked out for good. In a big way.
It was in the course of my time as a personal assistant that I learned the very basic elements of coding html (web programming). I had cause to send out html email notes on a weekly basis to a subscriber list and in doing so the groundwork was laid for a whole new world of opportunity!
When my tenure as a PA ended abruptly I was at a loose end for a number of months; in limbo… I was busily applying for jobs elsewhere but having NO response. NONE.
Instead I took it upon myself to get busy with one of the sites I now look after full time. It was sorely neglected and came alive with some care and attention… I’d really only done it to keep to keep busy but the techy who’d had a brief run at age 17 was getting a revival at age 37!!! It actually only took 20 years!
The short story is that while I’d been trying to find something else, management where trying to figure out what to do with me and the IT department were trying to find someone to take on the (rather large and complicated) website at church full time…
If you were in to that sort of thing you could say that the planets aligned and we all fell into place.
Or you could say that it was Divine Intervention…
Either way… I’m still there, still loving technology and best of ALL…
Still learning.