Hard jobs
Category: Navel Gazing...
Posted Friday, August 01, 2003 at 01:10 PM [GMT-6]

One of the things I love about my work is the wide variety of clients I deal with.

For instance, right now I'm designing websites for a cardiologist in Odessa, a professional eyecare association in Illinois, and a northern Italian restaurant and the United Way in Midland. I'm just getting underway with a site for a local organization who is making breakthroughs in speech therapy for stroke victims. We just went live with sites for the Midland County Republican Party and a consultant who specializes in high school and college speech and debate tournaments.

Besides getting to interact with a lot of interesting and [generally] nice folks, I also learn a lot about their businesses and organizations. We are, after all, presenting them to the world... potentially, anyway... and most of them rely on me to assess how best to describe the details to their target audiences.

That's not always a good thing, however. This morning, I uploaded the new website for the Midland Rape Crisis and Children's Advocacy Center (MRCCAC). Working on that site was one of the more depressing projects I've ever participated in. I mean, they do great work -- really important work -- but it's just the fact that they even have to exist that's so sad. This is not work for the faint of heart, as you can imagine.

I worked with Christina, the Education Program Director. She told me that an increasing number of their clients are males... victims of rape and sexual abuse. I thought that only happened in Big Cities. She gave me more statistics about sexual assault and child abuse than I really wanted to know. And I don't even want to talk about the meta tag keywords that I typed into the source code of the site to help people who need it, find it.

God bless these people who really are working on the front lines to help victims of crimes so unspeakable that they must be spoken about (does that make sense?).

And it gets worse. The MRCCAC has a grant to create a website for the Child Sexual Victimization Task Force of Midland. Again, it's a shame of society that there's a need for such a website.