Another internship is done

Sad to say that today will be my last day at work, but I have the most awesome reason for leaving. I'm going on maternity leave! YAY! My baby is due on January 12th. If she's born anytime next week, we will be thrilled! We know it's going to be a girl, and we do have names picked out. We have pretty much everything we need, and we're as ready as new parents can be.

I just wanted to let everyone know that I had a great time as a CAP youth intern. I started in the the fall of 2009 and even worked through part the summer last year doing some of the same kind of work. It was very interesting and fun. I had some great success stories along the way. People really do appreciate the services we provide and the work that we do. I hope that the following interns are as open to learning and have as much fun as I did.

Internship coming to an end...

With just a couple of weeks to go, my internship is coming to an end. That makes me a little sad. I really enjoy working as a CAP YI intern. What I get most out of this is that it makes me feel like I belong in the community. It makes me feel needed and useful and I really enjoy helping people. To know that someone has learned something from me, make me feel satisfied. Everyone has needs, like the need to belong, the need to survive, the need to be powerful and free and the need to love.

My position as CAP intern fulfills my need to belong and if knowledge is power, then my power need is fulfilled too. And of course getting paid fulfills my need for survival. Being able to set dates with people that work with my schedule and the people feeling grateful that I can help, partially fulfills my needs for freedom and love. This is an all around great job to be doing. You learn and teach at the same time. You can have fun and get work done at the same time. You have space yet people around you at the same time. If this were a long term, full time position I would definitely want to be in it.

To all interns and non-interns: Live in the NOW and embrace the positives!

House call

House Call

In a pretty small community where everyone knows everyone, I thought it would be OK to make a house call. As a side job I do a bit of house cleaning. And the guy I do this for needed some help with his computer. It’s an old computer, big heavy tower, as old as a dinosaur and as slow as a snail. It was simply not performing as some of the newer, faster computers of today. He and his wife also have laptops but he prefers to work on his old desktop PC. So he had gone out to a computer store and bought himself a new one, brought it home and tried working with it. He found it didn’t work so well for him because it was not compatible with the older programs he was using. You see, he’s working on his family genealogy, which goes way back to the 1600’s. This is important family history information you don’t want to lose. He brought back the new computer and hooked up his old one again and came to ask for help. He wanted me help him organize his folders and programs. He wasn’t sure what was wrong, but he knew his computers were a mess.

I went to his house thinking I could show him how to create folders, drag and drop files into them and he would be on his way. But when I took a look at how he had his folders sorted out on his laptop, it was perfect. They were very organized, so I didn’t understand why he thought it was a mess. But when I looked a few things that might make his computer slower, I saw that the virtual memory was getting a little low and his hard drive was getting really full. And I couldn’t seem to find out how he could have filled it up so fast with what seemed to be so little on his laptop. But as we looked even deeper and he showed me the program he was having trouble with, we noticed that there were duplicates of certain files. So we figure that was the problem that was confusing him. Duplicate files in different or the same folders.

On his old PC though, it pretty much was a mess. There was maybe 500mb of free hard drive space, virtual memory was running really low and there were tons of old programs and software he never used anymore or didn’t even know he had or what they were for. So we started clearing out old programs like that, and updating his antivirus program. This took the better part of the afternoon. As for homework, I asked if he could work on organizing his files on the old computer, just like he did with the new one. Create folders, drag and drop the files, and delete duplicates.

I also recommended that he get himself an external hard drive to keep all of his family photos, scanned funeral cards and genealogy history as a backup.

He seemed a little overwhelmed, but very happy to know that he doesn’t have to lose everything and start over and that with a little maintenance, everything will be just fine.

Mother and son success

A lady and her son came into the cap site one day, brought their laptop and a USB stick. They came pretty well prepared wanting to print out the son’s resume. He had made his resume and I took a look at it to make sure he had all the needed information. After fixing a couple of little technical mistakes he made in Word, I asked him if he was going to attach a cover letter along with his resume. He hadn’t thought of it and didn’t know how to go about making one. I was really busy with other people at that moment, so I just printed out the pages that show how to make a cover letter and asked if he would read it and try to make one and then to come back if he needed more help. They were very thankful and excited that they received help so quickly.

A few days or about a week later the son comes in again and asks to print out a few more resumes and cover letters this time too. He had done a good job of making the letter on his own.

His mother came back to me too asking for help emailing an order for Norwex products. She’s a consultant and independent sales person for these products, I had also just had an in home product party with her. She had been having difficulties placing the orders through the website and her email. So we went through it together here at the CAP site and sent it via email. The problem she was having was with Microsoft Excel when filling out the order sheets. She kept missing that there were different pages within the file and I showed her how she could see them and where to click. It was a success. The products came in about a week later!

February 3rd, 2010

Last week was a crazy busy week, like it always is at the end of the month. The newsletter has to be finished and printed for the communities in the region. My supervisor hasn't been at work for over a week because she's having serious back problems, only a lot of physio, painkillers and rest will help her right now. So she's out of the game for a while. I try to pick up the slack a little bit with little things I can do to help her out around here like answering the phone, taking messages, faxing, photocopying or being the messenger. The activities coordinator is here only 3 days a week, so I do what I can to help her get things done around here too.

There have been more and more people coming in to use the CAP site in the past couple of weeks. I think the word is finally starting to spread that we are here to help and offer great services. Some people are finally taking advantage of that. Like this elderly lady I'm helping, who's learning about emailing and sending pictures via email and web surfing and that kind of stuff. She keeps telling me: If someone can teach you something, learn it. You never know when you might use it.

It's amazing that at over 80 years old, we can still learn about things we could never imagine as a child. Technology is evolving all around us and at every level. It's impossible to keep up with everything, but to keep the mind young, keep learning about anything that interests you.

Over 80 and still learning!

I was in the restaurant helping to prepare for a banquet one evening. It was about closing time for the public, and an elderly couple was having a cup of coffee while waiting for their car to come out of the garage across the street. The elderly lady asked the waitress if she knew anything about the tutorials from the CAP poster in the entrance of the building. The waitress said to the lady that she knew the intern and came to get me in the kitchen to go talk to her. I go out into the restaurant to talk to the lady who’s interested in the tutorials. I had not gotten many replies from the poster, just a few saying they were interested but never showed up or never came to ask for more information. But this lady was saying that these tutorials that I was offering were exactly what she would need to improve her computer skills. So we set a date for that same week and I asked if she could write down her questions and make a little list of the things she wants to learn.

The elderly lady of over 80 years old, showed up as she said she would, with her binder full of papers to take notes, and she had her list ready too. She used to be a teacher and now the positions were switched, she would be the student, and I would be the teacher. I vaguely knew the lady from when I was younger. I would go around with my mom, delivering milk, from our dairy farm and this lady was one of the customers.

We stared with the basics of email: how to check email, how to reply, forward and create new email, etc. After sending out a few test emails that she felt comfortable with, we moved on to something different. I showed her how to upload pictures from her digital camera to her computer and then to select the few that she wanted to have developed and put them on a USB stick.

We’re meeting up about once a week to continue to improve her computer skills. She now has more confidence to use her computer to keep in touch with family, friends and current events. When we started, she had not used her laptop for 3 month and had only just looked at it a few times. She still calls me or emails me with questions, but now that she’s more oriented with her laptop, we can usually work it out through the phone.

January 14th, 2010

One month until

Valentine's Day!!!

I love lovie-dovie holidays like Valentine's and Christmas when you get together with loved ones and celebrate. I'm a sappy romantic that way sometimes...

I loved being able to help people. It felt good knowing that I helped someone to understand something, or make them feel better, or just give a helping hand. This past week I had been able to help quite a few people. It made me realize that although my job may not have a big impact on the whole community at the moment, it has help a few people who DO have some impact on the community, and by helping them function with their computers more easily, it will simplify the job they do within the community. One who is a writer and helps to teach creative writing at school needs to have a good functioning computer. Another who does the administration for the parish needs to know how to use his programs in an efficient manner. And another one who's on many boards in the community, writing up reports and gathering and sharing information on projects that affect the community could use some technical related stress relief. I'm happy to be of assistance.