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I am the webmaster. Are you the gatekeeper?
I went on to an interview yesterday for an organization that finds internships in Belgium. I'm not very confident in their ability to find me an appropriate internship that will fulfill SI's requirements for a Directed Field Experience, because I'm not sure the director understood what I wanted out of the program. Lots of their "internships" are actually just summer work experience abroad - teaching English, working as a camp counselor, working retail, etc. I don't know if he fully appreciated that I needed something structured in my academic field and that I couldn't really afford to be flexible. It's also quite expensive, for a program that might not be exactly what I'm looking for. So I'm not sure that I'm going to pursue it any farther.
When I talked to the program's director about what I wanted to do, he said that he was behind the digital age and asked me, as webmaster for the Overseas Opportunities Office, for advice on his website. Some universities had written to him, he explained, and said that they wanted to link to his website. And he wanted me to write down how to do that.
"It's quite easy," I explained. "They can just link to you. That's all."
He insisted that I write down how one would do that, so that he could show it to his webmaster.
"But any webmaster should know how to do that. It's one of the basics of HTML. And for them to link to you, you don't need to do anything."
He insisted. He needed to show his webmaster what the steps were to make a link with another site.
"But--"
I gave up. I took his piece of paper, went into the other room, and tried, to the best of my ability, to explain the concept of linking to someone who clearly had no idea how the Internet works and didn't have the slightest clue what he was paying this webmaster for.
Do you have any idea how hard that is to do?
srah - Saturday, 8 November 2003 - 10:01 AM
Tags: work
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Comments (3)
the real MaTT - November 10, 2003 - 1:00 AM - ℓ
That's awesome -- isn't life just more grand when people sincerely and seriously ask you to do the most frighteningly simple things? if you went to work there i doubt you'd have a very stressful job (although frustration may count as stress i guess...) on second thought, definitely don't take that job :-) That's almost like my explaining to my Greek roommate how to operate the thermostat... i know it may be difficult at first, but she's an MBA for gosh sakes... (plus she doesn't believe that even i know what i'm doing, which may be true in many cases but not in this one!) :-)
I'd have smacked him in the head right off the bat.