Letters to Dave in 2001 Working on various writing projects
These are all clearly rough draft ideas. I took no time to correct them grammar wise but found there were some good points that I later used in other projects.
Letter I wrote to Dave March 27, 2001. He was helping me with my Computer Book I was writing.
Dave I just wrote this tonight. I let it fly as if I were rambling in the mirror exercising and sing. Fully giving myself permission to be a child 5 to be exact has allowed me to receive many gifts. I hope to share these with you. This is going to be something in the Passion for Computers Series. Let me know if you can comprehand. No Disclaimers….or even spell check. I don’t have time for that. Use phonics
Love
Heather
Forgive yourself for not being born a techie.
Being a technician and loving people unleshed a passion for me. As a child I always said that I wanted to be in communications. I wanted to communicate a message to others. The thought of helping others made my heart sing. When I turned college age, my logical and sometimes punishing side of myself drifted toward technology. I enjoyed computers and wanted to learn how things around the house worked. This desire lead me to move from Florida to Arizona and enroll in ITT, a two year college that trains students to become experts in up to date technology. Graduating with honors, and obtaining a degree in electronics and computer science made me feel proud. School made me realize that communication is needed in technology just as much as in psychology. I still craved knowledge about people. Going to school taught me that all knowledge is visual. I watched people in class claim they were confident with what we were learning only to see them one week later talking to the teacher after class asking why they failed the test on the same subject that they thought they learned the week before.
This allowed me to forgive myself for thinking I was stupid when the students snickered as I insisted on visual instruction from my professors. I had long before realized to raise my hand when I had a question, and my grades proved it. Toward the end of college, scouts, recruiting from major companies, approached me. After each interview, my intuition told me that I would be bored working for everyone of them. This made me question my purpose.
It seemed like a catch 22. I didn’t want to be stuck as a bench tech working with machines all day. In choosing that I would have smothered my need to work with people. I wanted a balance.
How I found my balance
While I was going to school my parents purchased a computer. Then I got a computer. Email was amazing. 2000 miles away and we could still communicate. Going on the Internet I was like a kid in a candy store, except my candy was knowledge. I gave myself permission to find out any information about anything that I ever wanted to know. I surfed onto sites that satisfied my technical side and my communications side. There were night I stayed up all night. I discovered a link that would allow me to talk to experts in any subject I could think of. At the same time I really missed my mom and dad. To fill the desire to talk to them with out outrageous phone bills, I turned to the internet. In a matter of minutes I surfed onto the website http://www.phonefree.com and downloaded a freeware program called phonefree. Being so excited to try it out. I called my parents at 5:00am their time to insist that they attempt to download the very same program. “Its free, we can talk anytime of the day and you can even leave me voice mail.” That was my first attempt to teach computers. I felt passion for technology. Everyone has to know how to do this, I thought. My dad, knowing nothing about computers, listened as I told him to double click. He followed my simple instruction and was just as passionate about what I had found. “Can you hear me now?” He would yell from the other end of his house. He rigged up his microphone and speaker so that I could hear him. This was great. The closest thing to sitting in the same room together and it costs me no more then my monthly internet service fee. This was the beggining of our lessons. We would sit in the middle of the day text chatting, voice chatting, and using the drawing tool all at the same time and he was on the other side of the country. Then I realized that it didn’t stop there. I could talk internationally also. Personally I chose not to but for those who had family and friends overseas could talk for free also. I started to share this information. There were friends that I couldn’t convince. They said that it wasn’t really free. They thought there was a catch or that the government would step in and change it if it were the real deal. After many email attempts I realized their fears would keep them paying Ma Bell. Nothing is Free was their reality. Explaining the technology that enabled it to be free didn’t help, it just confused them more and added to their fear. How something works isn’t important to really benefit from something. My dad knew that if he click this picture on his desktop that it would bring up, another screen, connecting him to me. He didn’t need to know that His voice was being converted into numbers representing highs and lows, that were then transmitted through the phone lines. Knowing I could hear him was enough. Our communication increased greatly and he was learning right with me. How we see reality is how we choose to see it. Dad could have said oh no I don’t understand anything about computers and had been afraid to even try, but he trusted me. In his trust of me he let go of his fear of not being a techie. This gave us both a gift. It allowed him to learn to trust himself on the computer. Today he runs his business and does all his finances on his home computer. For me the gift gave me “my balance.” I wanted to help people who knew nothing about the computer understand that they don’t have to be afraid. Technicians sometimes because of their lack of understanding tend to get defensive when they have to break it down to laymans terms. I believe that if someone really learns something then they should be able to teach it to a two year old. The simpler the easier. Who cares if you ever know what a Gigabyte really is. I know and it hasn’t really changed my life. When Bill Gates and his team at Microsoft created Windows, a program that changed computer technology as we knew it, people realized that they didn’t have write code to make the computer work. They could see what they wanted and click it to get it. W.Y.S.I.W.Y.G is what made Bill Gates the richest man in the world. It stands for What You See Is What You Get. Today Mostly every computer uses his programs based on this secret ingredient. The numbers hadn’t changed. Code is still written by programmers. Its just that Bill Gates realized that we don’t need to know how it works to use it. Today people are so confident in his marketing that many people purchase computers blindly having never taken a class in hope to learn after their purchase. I like this approach for one reason, we only learn anything by doing it. Experainceing what the mouse feels like in your hand cannot be described even by the person who invented it. Thoses who jump in get wet and by getting wet we learn to swim and only then can we set our goals on surfing, (the web that is).
What You See Is What You Get
This is true in everything, not just computers. My friends who refused to use the phonefree program saw that “Nothing was Free” as their reality and that is what they got “Nothing”. While my father saw the picture on the screen, expecting nothing to happen, ready to exprierence everything that happened, and dealing with it as it came, received the gift of knowledge. Whenever we would run into problems I would remind him just to describe what his screen looked like. “Tell me what you see” As he described I listened, understanding that he didn’t know what an icon was nor did he care to, and keep focus on what he was describing. “I clicked on the picture and it is blue, nothing happened.” From that I knew that he just didn’t double click. I could then help him correctly without making him feel like less of a person for not already knowing what an icon was. I have heard technicians become upset with beginners in the past. I believe that they do this because they really don’t know how to communicate. If you really see an icon and know what it means then you could understand that a two year old would discribe it as a little picture on the screen.
We Are All Two Year Olds
Learning about computers is like learning to walk. we need to trust our technicians to listen and understand as we describe what just happened on the Computer Monitor just as we trusted our parents to hold our hands while we took our first steps. We are all new to technology. Programs are being written everyday even the techies have a hard time keeping up with it. The programmers the people writing these programs don’t know if all the bugs are worked out. Most times they find out from you. Just as when a two year old crys their mother knows he or she is hungrary, the programmer hear you describe what happened on your screen and they backtrack from there. They find out it was something from line blah blah in the program and they fix it. There are updates and 2nd and 3rd additions of most software programs being sold because of user who had “something they didn’t expect to happen when they clicked on the little picture.” It is not your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong to create these error most times, so forgive yourself for not being a techie and know that you are helping technology by making friends with tech support. Understand that sometimes the techs don’t know what caused your errors. They simply report them to the programmers. We are all in this exciting journey into the information age together.
What is being loved?
Finding God Center in yourself only by loving your faults and acknowledging your fears enough to cradle the baby in the manger. You are the baby in the manger. There is that child inside us all that remains un acknowledged and afraid. If we learn to love that child then we can love others.
What does love look like?
The cradle is laid by your love and forgiveness for you. The fears disapate from your space a circle is formed. A sage place for those in need of acceptance and approval. You create a safe place for those who need love. It becomes so sage that they lose defenses and befin to expose themselves for themselves. Me for Me is sefish. Without some selfishness what do you know to give? When you, only feeling your love, not fear become god like, no judgment or fear for others. The others are only the ready ones needing to emerge. The dark ones will gladly leave when they begin to see themselves.
What is the high that love gives you?
You capture . then you truly love your audience. Allow them to dance in your fire send acceptance. Body language confirms what brains and fear can deform. Validation really being connected provides growth.
