Danny Glenwright

Challenging your worst demons

Header rows repeat, please Danny.
Please use header rows repeat.
DANNY – I insist on header rows repeat!
But what did it mean? What was header rows repeat?

It was the question foremost on my mind in my first two months at Gender Links. What exactly did Colleen mean when she stated that three-worded request in cryptic emails?

At two months in I had managed to successfully navigate the stormy seas of spelling wars, typically preferring UK over American spellings anyway. Being a Canadian I’d spent my life straddling these two identities. I had added my u’s and doubled my l’s, ensured my organise and trivialise never had a z. I had even grown to love Tahoma. But I just couldn’t sort out my formatting.

Editors get sloppy too. In my case I neglected formatting in favour of other things. But at Gender Links there are no short cuts, no brushing of anything under rugs. It was time for this journalist to confront the formatting bogeyman, time to learn how to make those header rows repeat. Well, quite a bit past time, truth be told.

What’s special about Gender Links is that although Colleen insists on the rows at the top of tables repeating on subsequent pages to ease reading, there isn’t much other repetition. It is an organisation that keeps me guessing, a work plan that is always changing and an organisational atmosphere that, aside from those header rows, is not based on repeating itself or what others have done, but rather on paving new roads and leading the way in difficult terrain.
Working these past six months at Gender Links has meant I’ve had to confront more bogeymen than I might like, but it’s all in the spirit of personal growth. Who can complain about that?

So although my job entails many things I love, from working with journalists and editors throughout the region to writing stories that matter and bring about change, it is also full of those frustrating daily challenges.

Yet it’s those things that stand out. It’s what I will take away. Because where other jobs have allowed me to skirt issues I don’t like and avoid work I don’t find appealing, my job at Gender Links has forced me to wade deeper into such work.
So although I’d probably still rather clean a toilet than design a budget or an Excel spreadsheet, at least I now know how to do it. And I still don’t love creating complicated tables but you can bet that when I do I use header rows repeat. There’s simply no other way to do it.

Danny Glenwright   is the Communications Manager at Gender Links.