I am sitting in the control station at the Internet Garage, surrounded by computer monitors. I haven’t worked here since January but the manager was going out of town and asked if I wanted to pick up shifts, so I said sure, if for no other reason than that I’m always looking for excuses to avoid going out Friday nights. But this place has its charm. It’s good to be back in IT, troubleshooting and giving people the most precious gift of all: Internets. Well, selling it to them for exorbitant rates, but whatever.
It’s also a bit strange to be back here. For one, because people are all like “O hey the IG girl is back!” (I’m the only girl who has worked here in the past ~2 years). But also because things have kind of come full circle. The fall is when that kind of thing usually happens for me. I mean, this is where it all started. I was sitting in this very seat when I made my first WordPress account, when I pressed publish on my first blog post. The IG customers were the first to hear my exclamations of glee when I saw what a link from the New York Times website could do for the traffic of a quirky, small-time culture blog (an old pseudonymous one, not TMD). And it was working here that I collected the dozens of hilarious remnants I occasionally post in the Found series on here.
I guess this is also where I decided that the blogosphere was something that I wanted to be deeply involved with, as a writer and as a Web 2.0 technophile. When I was in college and an editor on my school newspaper, I used to be skeptical of the blogosphere and its ability to provide rewards for the writer, professionally and financially. I once even made a facebook group called “Fuck blogging. My thoughts are worth $$”. Yes yes, while you may know me now as a major blog enthusiast and proponent of Open Access, Open Science, and the idea that the web is changing journalism as we know it for the *way* better, I admit I had my curmudgeonly moments. But this was back when Twitter was saturated with the breakfast-describer variety and it was a rarity to encounter people over 40 on the Facebook. It’s funny how things change.
There really isn’t a purpose to this post other than reflection…
