Bill Stowe
Past Officer (Advertising & Membership) 1993-1994
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I have been asked to write a few lines about my experience as an “Ex-Com” which has an ominous ring to it but only means I once volunteered some of my time for the Association.

I got involved in TESOL France immediately upon my arrival here in 1992.  I found a great group of people working for the organization and was pleased with the idea of grafting myself onto this fine troupe including:
 

Somehow I found myself helping Gary. One of my great interests as a new teacher was to learn what resources were available on the market. What better way to do that than to have to regularly irritate the book and test merchants with my pitch to buy ad space in the new TESOL Newsletter (yes there once was a time when it didn’t exist!). My wife was amazed at my bravery - a lot of my schmoozing had to be done on the telephone and in my broken French.

Somehow “helping” became “being responsible for” and I also volunteered to “help with” Membership. One day I was led to a hole of an office at Télécom Paris and told that was the TESOL France office and that it was generously donated by Telecom ParisTech to us. Then I was told that the list of members existed on a program called db4 and you had to be an engineer, or almost, to add a new line to it (the Telecom ParisTech students graciously donated some of their time too! Let’s never forget the TESOL France-Telecom ParisTech ties as they live on very strongly today!)

Then someone suggested we buy something called a spreadsheet. You have to remember the context. The computer I had in my home I had bought in 1987 as a “bargain”. For $1,500 (sic) I got an Apple Mac with NO hard disk, a printer and the software to run it and print papers. Each time you booted up you had to put in a diskette to load the operating system then put in another diskette with your “Microsoft Word for Macintosh” software. I didn't know what the hell a spreadsheet was or was supposed to do. Another great member-helper, Denny Packard, tried to explain but it was a bit beyond my ken. Fortunately? I had to move out of town before I had to buy the software so I don't know what they did purchase. Nowadays everyone uses Microsoft Excel and doesn’t think twice. TESOL France’s database is now in such a format and exploitable in ways I didn’t dream of it when I first saw it in the bowels of TelecomParis Tech.
 

Treat the current and future TESOL France staff like angels because that is what they are.