Part of my job is provide training and support for our web system on campus. I’ve taught a lot of people and most of them take to editing the pages pretty easily.
There are exceptions, of course. Including a very small few that might be unteachable – ironic for a university.
Not that they can’t learn – they really just don’t want to.
But, I’m me, and I don’t give up on them. By slow degrees and email after email, I can usually bring them around and get the least amount of work out of them as possible.
One of my current projects is a staff member in an academic department that has told me that she literally cries when she has to update a webpage. I’m pretty sure that’s not literal and I’m also pretty sure she’s hoping that she’ll just be so bad at it that I’ll give up and just do the work for her.
We’re not there yet, but getting close.
Recently, she was having trouble updating a professor’s name on their bio.
Really? Once you get to the right part of the system – which I’ve shown her, like, a lot – it’s the easiest thing. Some days it would take longer to get logged in than do that kind of update – depending on the network.
I sighed, then prepared to rewrite the instructions for her again. I took a look at the professor’s email that my troublesome editor had forwarded to me and it was utterly lacking in the actual problem. It was “wrong” – but no details on what was wrong about it.
I sighed again, then did some checking. The bio in question had a feminine first name, but the professor’s email signature had that same first name – but missing a letter in a way that still worked, but made it more… ummm… generic? Or at least non-gender specific.
They also included (he/him/his) after the name.
Ah, okay.
I would imagine one of the struggles in being a transgender individual would be in getting other people to get your name right. I don’t know that that was the case here, but I figured I could err on the side of compassion and help him directly instead of going back and forth with the reluctant editor. Which, based on prior experience, could have taken literally weeks.
So, I checked the People Directory – since this would show the legal name as far as the University/HR was concerned – and made the updates. I contacted him directly by email and explained the changes, asked if other changes were needed, and offered to upload a new CV since I saw that was inaccurate as well.
He thanked me for my help and sent along a corrected document and a new photo which I uploaded.
And that was that.
I can’t really relate to what this professor was going through as transgender. I’m a dude and I love being a dude and can’t imagine not being a dude. My inherent dudeness is, well, not something I’ve ever questioned.
But, it doesn’t mean that I can’t recognize when someone is frustrated and maybe help things go a little more smoothly. Especially when it’s something as fundamental to a person as their name.