Gloria always considered herself as not very knowledgeable about computers. That was because she was always comparing herself to me. In comparison to pretty much all of her co-workers, in all the various jobs that she had; in education, in industry, in government, and in business; Gloria, in whatever office she was working, very quickly became the person to go to for help with computer operations.
Even before she met me, Gloria was the person who determined the new computer that was to be purchased for Regent College. She was the one who specified what was needed, and she was the one who had final refusal over the various proposals from vendors.
At one point Gloria was approached by an assistant manager, who noted that he had just deleted all of the boilerplate files that the staff were used to using as templates. Gloria informed him that she was pretty certain that those files could not be recovered, because of the process that he had followed in doing the deletion. Gloria, to double check, contacted me, relayed the process that had been followed, and I confirmed that, yes, she was absolutely correct, there was nothing that could be done: those files were gone. Subsequently, the assistant manager came back to Gloria, and said that he had found a workaround. He had found a listing of recently used files in one of the programs, and they would simply use those. Gloria explained, as gently as she could, that that list was simply a list of pointers, and did not mean that those files were, in fact, still available. (Gloria checked with me about that, as well, and I confirmed that she was absolutely correct.)
But what I, personally, found most impressive was that Gloria was asked, by the Vancouver Women's Musical Society, to take on the society's website. The board felt that all that needed to be done was to keep the website up to date, by entering new information as it became available, and therefore this was simply a clerical function. In fact, what they had asked for her to be, was their webmaster (or webmistress), and that this was a fairly technical undertaking.
I worked with Gloria on her initial review of the site. Gloria was concerned about the different font sizes, font typefaces, and font colors, that had been entered into the site over a number of years. An awful lot of the extraneous font information have resulted from people simply copy and pasting from MS Word documents, directly into the website. The web content management system had tried valiantly to make sense of all of this material, but nobody had ever either planned what the website should look like, or looked at what was happening as they simply threw pieces of documents into the web pages.
In order to show Gloria what had happened, I taught her how to use the HTML editor (HyperText Markup Language, the building block of the Web), and taught her what some of the HTML meant.
Gloria had always loved the Word Perfect word processor. She loved the control that it gave you, and the fact that when you turned on a printing or publishing feature, you had to turn it off again. She took to HTML right away, loving it because of the same mindset behind it: when you turned on a change, you had to turn it off again again. Logical. She loved the control that gave her, and very quickly realized what she had to do to clean up all the hundreds of old, extraneous, redundant font commands that were buried in the HTML and all of the various web pages. She became, essentially, a web developer. She knew more about HTML, and could use it better, then an awful lot of the web developers who style themselves as such.
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