When you get into a tight place and everything goes against you, till it seems as though you could not hang on a minute longer, never give up then, for that is just the place and time that the tide will turn. (Harriet Beecher Stowe)
As a writer my laptop and printer are something like hands and eyes—absolute essentials. I have been having some difficulty with my Internet service and so I called support. The woman at the end of the line stopped thanking me for my patience within minutes. Possibly because she needed to hold onto her own endurance. After all she was talking to a woman from the days of carbon paper and the manual typewriter. No, I do not have fond memories of tearing up a full page of print because of a typo on the last line. But, I have not grown up with the full terminology that younger folk have either.
“Now type these numbers into the long center line,” she directs.
This statement is ambiguous. There are two lines. Naturally I choose the wrong one. She asks what I see.
“Yahoo.”
“Uh, no,” she says. “We are not on the same page.”
I would love to turn the page. I just don’t have a clue how to do it. I’m Curious George flying the plane and the Control Tower is giving directions to a monkey at a panel full of switches. Eventually, the task is completed. My computer has a new name and password. However, I do not discover that my printer and laptop aren’t speaking to one another anymore until after my tech assistance call has ended.
I call a friend, a teacher who doesn’t have school today because of the weather. He suggests getting a cord between our Wi-Fi box and printer, at least temporarily until he can come to our house and negotiate peace with our desktop equipment.
As Jay and I are facing the cold we see our new neighbor, Thad. Jay tells him about our woes.
“Really?” he says, and then hesitates. “Have you got a minute? I can look at it.”
“Sure.”
Are you kidding? A techni-smart angel appears at exactly the right moment? How can I not have a minute?
We traipse ice and snow inside and Thad finds no place to put a connector into our printer. It is 100% Wi-Fi. I hadn’t found a place either, but our friend had insisted there had to be one. Soooo, I figured he would find it if we didn’t. In some secret flap maybe. Like a hidden passageway behind a bookcase. I wouldn’t know.
Thad sits down and plugs in a series of numbers. I recognize some of them. My tech-help person had led me into a similar hidden chamber not that long ago. Thad’s fingers fly from site to site with the precision of a concert pianist. Soon, he tells printer what it needs to know to make up with laptop again. My electronic world is one big happy family again.
I am so ecstatic I hug Thad. Jay gives him a bottle of champagne.
Thad’s appearance could have been coincidence, some lucky serendipity. Then again, it could have been a divine gift of some kind, an ordinary blessing easily overlooked. But hopefully, not easily forgotten.
Thanks, Thad! Welcome to the neighborhood.
terrypetersen 