A Proposal for the Senior Center

Friday I had one of those serendipitous events that sets your head spinning. Normally I embrace such events since I am a great believer in fate and destiny and deja vu and all that stuff. However, my last date with destiny did not turn out so well. So I'm approaching this one with caution not wanting to jinx it.

My cousin Brian and I have this thing about jinxing. Anytime we are having one of our betting competitions (baseball, football, Project Runway, whatever) we try to jinx each other by wishing each other luck. You are never allowed to get too confident about your own picks or you will jinx yourself and you never want to do that.

But serendipity makes me feel good so I was kind of walking around with a smile on Friday afternoon. I did resist the temptation to spend money on a pizza and ate the last of my depression food of the week which was made from scratch mac and cheese with tuna chunks in it. I don't need no stinkin' box to make mac and cheese even though I do think they had it during the depression. But more on depression style cooking in another post.

So here's what happened. It could be one small step for Karen, one giant leap for SeniorTech.

After getting busted at the grocery store for handing out flyers, I had to think of other places to do my marketing. I hung a flyer at the Burger Nook (and had a burger) and then headed over to the senior center. I asked the receptionist if I could leave a pile of flyers. She said no but I could put one on their bulletin board. Then I asked her if I could talk to the person in charge of scheduling their classes. I thought I'd build a little good will by volunteering to teach a couple of computer classes.

I had to wait to see the programs manager but when I finally did and told her who I was and what I did she was very excited. It seems that she is fairly new in the job (less than a year) and one of her priorities was to bring technology to the seniors. At the beginning of the year she got her new budget and was currently in the process of upgrading the computer labs at all four locations. She also said that they were currently using university students to teach the classes because they needed to do 20 hours of community service to graduate. The seniors weren't entirely comfortable with the students because they weren't very good at translating geekspeek into plain English or Spanish. If the seniors did get comfortable it didn't matter because after 20 hours they were gone.

So we had a lovely conversation and she invited me to submit a proposal for how many hours I would like to work and how much I would charge and exactly what kind of classes I would teach. I'm thinking very basic stuff like e-mail, using Google or selling and buying on Ebay. Digital photography is a big topic now and of course some people just want Windows 101 with things like cutting and pasting and keyboard shortcuts...and even something simple as using a mouse.

I told her I would have a proposal to her by next week and I will keep all you faithful blog readers apprised of my progress.