200 Minutes

Yesterday, an elderly couple from down the street walked to my house to ask my help with a technological problem.

They came to the right place.

After all, I am King of the Geriatric Geeks.

You see, neither of these old folks is able to read or write. But they know that I can. Each of them has medical conditions and it’s not unusual to see a city rescue ambulance parked in front of their house with paramedics running in and out.

One of their granddaughters, knowing the old folks are shaky (they are as old as I am) and that they had no telephone, gave them a cell phone and a prepaid card with 200 minutes on it.

Problem is that you have to activate this device and manually add the minutes to it’s memory bank. This involves calling an 800 number at the prepay company, then going on the internet, punching in the 800 number there, then the cell phone number with area code, then a 15-digit IFD number (which you find by scratching an emulsion off the card), then punching in an 11-digit access code number, then there’s a 13-digit number just for the hell of it and then…

So, they brought this thing to me.

I talked on a cell phone once.

Ginny turned it on, punched in the phone number, and handed the tinny tiny phone to me and I talked.

Thus, being an experienced cell phone user, I had no idea how to activate the old folk’s telephone. Complicating matters, my macular degeneration makes if difficult for me to see those little buttons. So I used a real telephone to call a friend who has a cell phone and I ask him how he turns it on.

He explained the complex process to me in layman’s terms, “I always let my wife do that,” he said.

I admitted to Bubba and Dolly, my elderly friends, that I could be of no help. But they urged me to try to do this for them anyhow.

I said a silent prayer and called the cell phone company’s helpful answering machine in Calcutta. I counted the number of digits on the scratch & sniff card and punched in 13 of them, guessing which of the dot-matrix things are zeros (0), capital Os or maybe the letter D – 0OD they all look the same to my degenerate eyes.

Bubba and Dolly hovered on the edges of their chairs. I punched in 11-digit numbers and 15 digit numbers. We made a wild guess at whether the next number string was a IFG number or a SIG-2 number because you enter them differently but the instructions don’t tell you which is which.

It took us 45 minutes to do all this.

Then a message appeared on the screen: WAIT 15 MINUTES.

So we waited.

I often wonder if my dabbling at writing books on this computer is serving God or just indulging my own vanity. Hardly anybody reads my stupid books. What use are they. What use is this computer? Do I make any difference in the kingdom of Christ on earth at all with this thing? I thought about such things as we waited making small talk about children and grandchildren.

Dolly’s phone rang!

It was the prepay company.

The phone worked!

The three of us cheered. We stood up and hugged each other. We laughed like fools. We celebrated. We cried. We had beaten technology. The damn phone worked. It will keep working for 200 minutes.

I don’t know if my writing website, books and blog on this computer advances the kingdom of God or man… but I think that getting that cell phone to work for two old folks who can never read anything I will ever write was probably the best use I’ve ever put this computer to.

Thanks be to God.