Today is the retirement party for the lady who handles all of our communications and marketing here at work. She’s been here ever since this place opened and during her tenure has served as librarian, computer administrator (a title that later became known as “IT” toward the late 90’s) webmaster, web designer (another title that didn’t exist when she started here) and various other information-oriented tasks.

I believe she’s in her late 70’s so I’m inclined to give her some props for learning a whole buttload of new skills as the technology world changed in the 90’s. I’m pretty sure she learned html from the ground up and made our first website back in the day.

Technology finally started to catch up with her around 2000 when we hired an IT assistant (who, might I add also had no formal computer training.)  As it happened, earlier this year we fired the IT assistant and hired a real IT person with real credentials. He lives in our server room speaking litanies to the server’s machine spirit and maintaining our sacred link to the interwebs. Last year was the year when we finally got rid of the website that our aforementioned retiree had developed in the late 90’s. We replaced it with a new site designed by an external developer.

Through 2003-2006 I was one of the loudest protesters around here regarding our outdated website. I argued that it looked old, was hard to navigate, and was fraught with errors and broken links. It had pictures of people who had not worked here in years. During my protests I often volunteered to overhaul  the site design myself. I’m no web designer but it was certainly within my capability to take a 1999 web page and make it look more like a 2003 web page. I was secretly bitter that we didn’t have an IT staff full of l33t nerds sitting in an office full of broken computers, reading slashdot and silently mocking all of the staff who freaked out when we migrated to XP.

This place still has a long way to go. For a building filled with scientists I’d argue that it’s not nearly nerdy enough. Even the IT guy they hired earlier this year doesn’t seem nerdy at all!

I wrote </career> on the card we’re giving to the retiring lady. If she laughs she will be granted the honorary title of “nerd” in my book (my book is the only one that matters since I’m the nerd leader around here.)