Hello, everybody!
In my last post, I told of how I got an unexpected editing gig when the church I attend had me edit the descriptions of its spring small groups, which will be held via Zoom. The descriptions went up on the church’s website later in the week.
Right after I completed the job, one of our pastors approached me with another unexpected editing gig–editing a Bible study leader’s booklet which she is writing herself from scratch. 🙂 She is sending it to me lesson by lesson (there are nine of them), and when I finish editing the whole booklet, I will be paid.
Last Friday, a graduate student at a well-known research university reached out to me via email and asked if I would edit a master’s thesis. 🙂 I agreed to, and the student will send it to me later this week. Ah, but there was only one problem: Since I am unfamiliar with common first names in the student’s native country, I could not tell whether this person was a man or a woman. Not that it really matters, but I like to get a mental picture of each of my clients just for my own personal comfort.
What to do?
I turned to Google and searched the student’s first name. Google found me a website that told me that 96 percent of all people with that first name who were born in the last century are female. So I can be 96 percent certain that the student is a woman.
Hooray for Google!
It certainly beats sending someone an email that asks, “By the way, are you a man or a woman?”