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Societal Information |
My husband rues the day he introduced me to the computer. He had tinkered with them for years, and I, quite frankly, had found nothing compelling in looking at a tiny television screen filled with nothing but words. Where were the pictures?
Then we walked into a store where I heard the sound of elephants trumpeting, and I was hooked! It was my introduction to the world of Windows, and, more specifically, the Animals cd-rom. We soon ordered a new PC, with visions of sharing it.
But reality and dreams so often conflict. Besides my being a left-hander and his being a right-hander, our ways of working are entirely different. We couldn't find a common ground for that machine, and within a few months MY first computer found me. There it was, all alone on a shelf at Sam's Club, with a sign that said, "Reduced!"
As many know, this is a magical word, and that's the effect it had on me. It was the last one in stock of a model they were discontinuing, and it was equipped with all the gadgets I could ever want. And it had a HUGE 340 meg hard drive! I could never outgrow it!
We all know the fallacies in that statement, so I won't bother to go into them here. Suffice it to say that I now am using that computer in the kitchen, for my recipe files.
Soon we moved to a small town where I found that I had little in common with most of the people I met, and I felt like a fish out of water. I spent more and more time online, and eventually found an ISP who served this rural area. Since I call myself an information junkie, I found the Internet like having my own reference library.
I spent hours online, looking up anything that had triggered my interest. I found the best search engines for the way I think, and worked them as hard as I could. Then, one day, I stumbled into the virtual corridors of Spectrum Virtual University, and immediately began looking for classes to take.
I won't go into which classes I have taken, but through SVU's encouraging of the building of virtual community, I have met people who are interested in learning and growing, and I no longer feel quite so isolated in this small town. I have a peer group again.
Now, for those of you who have suffered through this, I'll give you a brief bit of info about who I am. I am a Baby Boomer who grew up in a small Mississippi city, who graduated from high school with the people I met in the first grade, and who graduated from Mississippi University for Women in the early 1970s. And then I returned to that same small city.I was going to change the world. I worked many years as a social worker, in everything from locked psychiatric wards to children's protective services. And guess what! The world didn't change.
Some of my interests (other than the computer) include:
It won't be long until we move from this small town back to my hometown, and I am looking forward to getting back. I will then get back to my volunteer activities, such as working at our local food pantry, and to playing handbells in our church's handbell choir.
Now you have a somewhat skewed view of what makes me Sally. For further info, please contact my husband, my mom, or my best girlfriend!
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Societal Team |