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!