Hey Reader!
Welcome to another week at NGI! Here's what's happening!
How Nerd Girl Industries Came to Be
(Sorry, this is longer than anticipated as my history in this field stretches back nearly 30 years.)
When I was in college in the 1990s, the internet was becoming a thing. I took a class on using the internet and our tools were primitive browsers with others text based including email. It turns out I had a knack for using and explaining the tech so I volunteered to do tech support for a local ISP (internet service provider). We're so used to high speed internet these days that the idea of dial-up is only remembered by the olds.
I answered questions from how to build a webpage (HTML was incredibly basic back then) to using email, FTP, and telnet I found I really enjoyed it so I created a resume highlighting my tech skills and sent to all the local ISPs within a 50 mile radius of my house. One of them took a chance on me and hired me to do phone support. More tools and apps were coming to market and the tech was evolving quickly.
(I found an old paystub from that time period and my pay was incredibly high at the time which was on trend for tech during this period.)
After about a year, I packed up my things and moved to the center of tech, San Francisco. I got a job doing tech phone support for a larger, corporate ISP, and then on to a smaller one for more money.
Every day was different, and I loved the challenges they bought. I moved up to in-person support, networking, research, and teaching. We got enough interest in in-person classes that I created and taught internet classes once a month. It was very successful. After a few years at that ISP, I moved to a larger company to do system networking and continued teaching. After a few years there, their parent company was involved in an accounting scandal, and they were laying off swathes of people. This was the perfect opportunity for me to go back to college before I was laid off and I got my degree in English Lit. Yes, it seems widely crazy to flip sides from the logical left brain to the creative right brain but English Lit and all it contained to the creative right brain was my first passion.
My obsession with all things tech and the internet never waned. I continued teaching friends from rebuilding their computers to app instruction. When I graduated from college, I posted an ad on Craig's List to do tech support for locals and that brought some income. I found a permanent job as a bookseller and went on to get my first graduate degree and the jobs slowed down as I no longer had time.
When I went on to get my second graduate degree (Masters in Library Science), technology in the library world was becoming huge as was social media. While libraries have always been relevant to their communities, technology would bring them to the cutting edge. My interest in tech and internet remained strong and once again, found myself as tech support for friends and peers.
In my second year of my MLIS, a speaker in my digital archiving class discussed their digital arching project which included a virtual exhibit on their website. They off-handedly mentioned a problem they were having with their website which I diagnosed and gave fixes. She was impressed and I was hired, as it were, for a semester long internship which included digital archiving and website maintenance.
My digital archiving instructor was impressed with my tech and internet knowledge and hired me as a digital librarian. Not only was I doing digital archiving, which I planned on going into as a career, but also maintained their website, blogged, and handled their social media. I wrote a lot about social media on the blog and started a series called Your Virtual Front Door that covered social media and tech for libraries and archives. This was 2010.
I worked for her past graduation until it became too much with my big girl job as a Web & Systems Librarian at a community college. Not only did I handle their library system software but put together a content strategy for their social media (Facebook, Twitter (at the time), and their blog). When I left in 2014, their social media presence had grown over 400%.
(I recently found my seven page argument as to why the community college library should be on social media and included resources and references. The reasons are still relevant 13 years later.)
It's been ten years since I left that job and just like the previous decades in other industries, I remained obsessed with tech and social media. Over the years, I did odd paying jobs on website design and maintenance (not my forte but I knew the software), social media, content strategy, content auditing; pretty much everything I'm offering now.
When I was laid off in September 2023, I job hunted like crazy but the market is stagnant and my field is overloaded. Six months later, Mr. Lisa and I had a long conversation about my future and concluded that starting my own business was the way to go.
And here we are!
My client base includes helping Boomers create email accounts and program their Jitterbug phones to helping non-profits detangle previous developer's work. As I mentioned last week, I'm developing classes and webinars.
Starting a business is hard and takes a lot of time, energy, and expense but you know what? It's worth everything I've put into it.
Social Media Tip
Tip: When creating an account on social media, make sure all your usernames match (or close approximation).
Why: This is one of the biggest mistakes I see people make. They are @thursdaythepug on Instagram and @pugthursday on TikTok (not real accounts). When users visit you on one social network, they more than likely want to visit you on others. They will expect your username to be the same across all networks to make it easier for them to find you. When the usernames are different, it makes it difficult for them to find it. It gets worse if you don't use the same name. Example: if you're Thursday P. on IG and your name is Thursday Pug on TT and the usernames on both networks are different, they won't be able to find you. Search can only do so much!
Meme of the Week
Have a good week!
Lisa and Thursday
