Crisis!

"Pardon me while I panic!"  This was the old familiar doom that overwhelmed me yesterday when I first tried to connect with the internet.  I hate that 'limited connectivity' sign that flashed over the network bars!  Now what's wrong?  It was so long that this had happened at home, praise the Lord, that for a short time I wondered what to do.  OK, unplug the router, wait at least 10 seconds, plug it back in: nothing!

Then I ran the computer through the 'check network' program: nothing.  I was feeling the pain!  I was stressing because I promised my church sisters a short piece every day in preparation for our meeting next week. "What should I do, go over to a daughter or friend's house and borrow a computer?"

The plan: unplug the router again and wait longer.  Re-boot the computer.  It worked!  Back in business again! I can relax and life can go on as usual.

In an emergency, I like to think of myself as cool, just working to get through it safely.  The computer is my weakness.  It is so complicated, so quick, so unforgiving.  It does well if you do everything precisely as it wants.  But mess up in the slightest, and it stops, deletes, refuses to do what you need at the moment.

I never wanted to learn computers in the first place.  I am not a child of technology.  But in nursing school in 1990, we students were told: you will learn computers.  And that was that.  Daughter #1, Anna, majored in computer science and did very well. She and her husband gave me their old computer when they upgraded.  I came to love the hand-me-up machine.  It was actually a glorified word processor but it made doing term papers a lot easier.

When daughter #8, Jeannie, was at home, she and especially her then boyfriend, Fielding, (now her husband), kept the computer running beautifully. No panic then.  But for now, I'm on my own, and have to decide if the problem is bad enough to call my son-in-law, Dave, in Massachusetts.  What a dear he is to put up with me!  I've learned so much.

My first genuine crisis I remember happened when I was 13 years old.  I had just completed a Babysitting Safety course.  Then my 5-year-old baby brother, Don, turned over a pot of boiling water on his ankle and sat in it!  My mother really panicked.  She was going to do things which actually would have been harmful.  I told her to take off his wet socks, wrap him in a towel and take him to the emergency room.  We did this and he recovered very well.

If you think that grumpy, bossy doctors, nurses, and the other staff in the emergency room are bored and uncaring, let me educate you.  We're running through our heads all the things we should be doing to help the patient, making sure we don't forget anything, and earnestly praying.  We DO want the patient to recover, whatever it takes.

As to my computer crisis, I'm planning to not have another one.  I discovered that there is a Patron Saint of Computers, Saint Isidore of Seville, Spain.  He died in the year 636.  He was proposed as the Saint of Computers by Pope John Paul II because Saint Isidore was the first to compile a sort of encyclopedia of all works of theology at that time.  Amazing!  I hope to remember to pray to St. Isidore for calmness in my next - it is inevitable, you know - computer 'problem.'

Thank you, my Lord, for helping me settle down and resolve my latest computer crisis.  Please help me get a grip that when it happens again, I'll be calm and try the things I hope will work.  Please help my friends, too, because they have similar problems periodically.