Today is Ada Lovelace Day.

I have spent the past thirty minutes doing two things: trying to decide which of the several possible Ada Lovelace posts I wanted to write, and tweaking file permissions on the website I’ve just finished designing and uploading after working on it for a month. I thought about describing my current job, and adding at the end that I’m a poet and dyscalculic, that I am not the person who’s supposed to be employed in the tech sector, but that the women who came before me and designed GUIs and assembly languages have given me access to work I love and am damn good at. I could talk about the experience of working on the Organization for Transformative Works and watching, wide-eyed, the people working on Dreamwidth, Open Source projects where women are a majority (in the former) and a powerful (in the latter) voice in running the place and how good it feels to know that I am not invisible in these places. I was wondering if maybe this is a chance for me to talk about learning Photoshop and InDesign and Seashore and how encouraging it was to know that grrliz had taught herself and had become grrliz, which is almost embarrassing to admit, because one of my mentors has no idea I exist. There was the thought of posting a rec list to the feminist blogosphere, because reading Shakesville and Feministe and Feministing and a dozen other blogs were my first experience of non-academic feminism in action, in public, feminism with young women who were as angry as I was, as disappointed as I was, as hopeful as I was, as confused as I was. I was considering apologizing to the tech support desk at a school I attended; she was the only woman and the public face of the office and I never thought about the gender balance in there and I should have.

But I’m going to write about something else. Something even smaller, but something that I think made me into the woman at this desk today.

I’m going to tell you about the woman who taught me how to use the internet for the first time. I was eight. I was researching Virginia for an oral report in class. This was before Google. And the internet was bewildering. I had used computers before — first-generation Apples, a Compaq my family acquired from the university someone worked at, which had a black screen and orange text; I still know MS-DOS because I used that computer up until 2003, when moving files from it to five-inch floppy disk to three-inch floppy disk to hard drive was more annoying than we could put up with any more. But I had never used the internet.

There was an awful lot of color out there, and a thing that didn’t have any appreciable use (the mouse), and while I could grasp hyperlinks, I struggled to understand the concept of a search engine. That was what cd $foo was for!

But this wonderful, wonderful woman sat there for hours with me, and suggested search terms and closed pop-up ads for me (because I didn’t grok the multiple windows idea, and this was long before Firefox and Adblock extensions) and reminded me to use the mouse and god only knows what else she put up with (look, I was eight), and when the afternoon was over, I had a big poster full of information about Virginia (did you know the state flower of Virginia is the dogwood? I do) and a faint sense that the internet was a good place to go to discover things.

The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.

But the internet tries damn hard.

No doubt I would have eventually learned to use the internet if she hadn’t taught me; I live in the Information Age. But I don’t know that I would have thought of it as a thing that held interesting information, just waiting for me to find it. I wouldn’t have wanted to explore it. And I wouldn’t have ended up here, at my desk, writing on my self-hosted blog. And we should not have met each other.