Editor's note: To celebrate National Newspaper Week, the Aiken Standard is spotlighting employees with 25 or more years of service.
Frequent daytime visitors to the Aiken Standard's office are likely to come in contact with Gloria Dairon, a fixture at the newspaper's front desk since 1991.
Customer service is her specialty, with a particular focus on placing legal advertisements – notices dealing with such concerns as real estate foreclosures, court summonses and applications for beer and wine licenses. She also helps with classified ads, obituaries, circulation, greeting visitors and answering phone calls.
One of her co-workers noted, "The thing I love about her is, when things get tough up there, as they often do, she never changes. Keeps on being who she is and goes with it."
A former co-worker added, "Gloria is the most dependable, kindhearted person in the world. She is always professional … As a supervisor, that was surely appreciated. Gloria really cares about customer service first and foremost … She knows that front office like no one else."
Dairon came on board as a part-time customer-service representative, and at the time (1991), the Aiken Standard was an evening paper on weekdays and a morning paper on weekends, she noted. She shifted gears in 1998, to work full-time in classified and customer service.
Placing legal ads is one of her favorite aspects of the job, as is the family-like environment in the office, she said.
Tremendous improvement has come in the area of "cutting and pasting ads." The earlier system had someone at the newspaper type in all the text and proofread everything. A mistake meant that "you would have to go back to that ad make to make the corrections, print it out, cut it out and paste it to the layout page," Dairon wrote. "When everyone was finished with their proofing, then it went to print."
Aside from work, Dairon is fond of traveling, and her recent destinations included Hawaii and San Francisco. Prior to her decades at the newspaper, she worked full-time in home health.
