curriculum vitae

Sarah Beth Jones, a timeline

1996
Much to the surprise of many who knew me at the time, I graduated from Walter Hines Page High School.

2002
When I graduate from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a B.A. in psychology, I skipped the gown but did wear a Phi Beta Kappa key. I maintained enough of a foothold in non-academic reality to realize that graduation would be the last time it was appropriate to wear said key.

2003
I started my first business, a personal chef service called Dining with Ease. My mom had suggested I name it Elegant and Easy, but I was afraid of being mistaken for a call girl service. The business lasted two years until I realized cooking was one passion I shouldn’t turn into a job.

2004
Wearing a dress fit for a 20’s starlet, I married my sweetie, Rob Jones, in the Nevada dessert. The minister was from a Vegas chapel and had prison tattoos on his hands. He used the word “cleave” over a dozen times in the course of the 10 minute ceremony.

Later in the year, I wrote an impassioned (read: whiny) editorial and sent it to my local paper. The next month, I wrote another. I wrote monthly columns for them for free until they offered me a paid, bimonthly spot that lasted until 2008, when I got axed in a third (or so) round of layoffs.

2006
Rob and I tempted fate by starting an IT business together. We named it Jones Computer and Networking. Jones CAN. It went amazingly well.

As the tech, Rob did most of the work for the business, leaving me free to take a position with Lede Public Relations, a small, now-defunct company where an employee was once tasked with enforcing breaks.

Inertia being what it is, I also start picking up freelance writing gigs, mostly profiles, mostly for business publications. Freelance writing continues to this day.

2007
For reasons that I can only attribute to masochism, I added the editorship of a community monthly, Shalom Greensboro, to my jobs. I spent four issues overhauling it before my workload started really interfering with my ability to breathe.

2008
After months of the kinds of negotiation only the most forgiving of friendships could endure, we sold Jones CAN to Tamara McLendon, owner of Lede PR. We are still friends.

By the end of the year, Rob and I had moved from my hometown to a farmhouse that was built in 1942 in 27 days with no power tools. I know this because the man who joined his family in building the house still lives on this same country road in Southwest Virginia.

2009
Though there are only 13,000 people in the whole of our newly-adopted county, there is an arts center with exhibits and classes, attracting tons of talented artists and craftspeople. I am now the seriously-part-time marketing coordinator there.

Around the same time that I joined the staff of The Jacksonville Center, Rob and I decided to take another dance with IT and opened Floyd Information Technologies. We specialize in turn-key websites for artists.

2010
I write: PR,  copy, features pieces, fiction, you name it. Floyd IT is thriving. The Jacksonville Center is, too.