Chapter
Librarian in Deep Water
By Michael
Abrams
Proposal
Specialist Lynn T. Sornson is good to have around when the team
roams into rough seas. I mean that literally because three times a week
she finds herself helping propel an outrigger canoe.
Lynn is the volunteer who has been staffing the library at our chapter's
last three monthly meetings. If you've taken out a book, you're already
impressed by her pleasant, easy-going conversation. So I did a double
take when she let on to being a member of Mission Bay's Ikuna Koa Outrigger
Canoe Club.
Ikuna Koa
sort of means "Strength and Victory," Lynn says. As for outrigger
canoes, she notes, you've seen one if you've watched an old "Hawaii
Five-0" episode. An outrigger canoe appears during the song and opening
credits. Grass skirts stick in my mind for some reason, but the outriggers
are the boats with the pontoony things—"ama" (float on
an outrigger canoe) connected by two "iakos," if you must know—hanging
off the side.
In her professional life, Lynn started out in IT as a programmer, working
for a company that sold medical billing software. While she wrote her
share of bug fixes, she also found that many of the "problems"
could be solved when customers had a better idea about how to use the
software. She started writing training materials and other documentation,
and found that though she loved computers (almost as much as outriggers),
she prefers communicating on a regular basis with people. She became a
technical communicator.
Since then, some 20 years all told, all of Lynn's jobs have required lots
of writing. But she didn't fully succumb to her destiny until 2001, when
she applied for and won an officially designated technical writing position
with San Diego's Widcomm, a developer of products built around the BlueTooth
wireless communications specification.
The same
year, she switched over to Anteon Corporation, an information technology
and engineering solutions company, headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia.
Much of Anteon's revenues come from contracts with the government, big
companies, or the military, so proposals are critical to the bottom line.
As a result, Lynn has become familiar with the many regulations that entangle
federal contracts—a good skill to have these days.
Lynn says the best part of her job is working on long-term projects, contract
awards that are known to be in the offing far in advance. It's not because
there's less stress, but because there's enough time to really polish
things. Very often, though, Lynn says she finds herself scrambling to
put together proposals quickly, working on tight deadlines. But she is
unflappable, so that's okay. And for real adventure she turns to her water-bound
hobby.
Tuesday and Thursday evenings she and her teammates practice on Mission Bay. Saturday afternoons they venture past the Mission Bay Jetty. This takes them into the ocean, which—may I remind you—is not always so pacific this time of the year! But Lynn is almost a San Diego native (her dad was in the Navy) so she can take it!
