Solstice

It's 21 December, the shortest day of the year. 

Coming up next will be, for me, the longest week of the year with lots of things to do to feed various hordes of people and make the place look festive.

I offer for this week's post a re-run from February 2010, a reminder that there are connections among us we may not see, but that come in handy when you're doing your taxes.

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On Monday night Bruce, our friend Angie and I were heading home for a nightcap after a nice meal out. We were down by the St. Lawrence Market on Front Street. We'd just turned the corner onto George Street. It was dark, cold and I was hunched inside my winter coat.

In the darkness, on the street, I thought I saw something in the gutter that struck me as strange. I was walking briskly along, so I was already twenty feet past the thing when I thought, "What was that? Was that a face??"

Had I seen a face in the gutter? "That's not right," I thought. So I stopped, turned on my heel and went back to see. Bruce and Angela weren't immediately aware that I’d broken ranks and were wandering away in the other direction on the sidewalk.

They realised I wasn't with them about the same time I got back to the strange thing in the gutter. It was a face. Betty Boop's to be exact. It was a beaded change purse. I picked it up.

Angie said "Ewwwww, what are you picking up out of the gutter?" 

My answer, when I'd had a better look was, "Credit cards, health card... all kinds of stuff."

I decided to take the purse home and see if I could contact the owner. Once home, I got online and reverse searched the address on the owner's driver's license to get her phone number. I called and got her answering machine, but she picked up after I'd explained why I was calling.

"You've got to be kidding," she said. When I'd convinced her that I really had no other reason to just call her up, she said she'd be right by to pick it up. I gave her my address and told her I'd be waiting for her.

Ten minutes later there was a knock on the door. The owner had come with her partner, just in case, I assume. The purse had simply fallen out of her pocket after she'd run some errands on George Street. It was handy I'd found it because she was flying out to Ireland the following day, and it would have been very hard to manage without her credit cards.

I gave her the purse. She offered me a reward. I said "thanks, but there's no need. Why don't you give the money to the food bank or something?" She said she'd do that. I wished her a nice trip, closed the door and they went away.

That's the first story about how oddly things align sometimes. Now for the second.

On Tuesday night, I took my first crack at my tax return. Every year when I do my taxes online, I write down my user name so I won't forget for the next year... and then I forget where I wrote it down.

I forgot this year, of course, and requested the online system to e-mail me my user name.

When I hit the "Send/Receive" button on my e-mail so I could retrieve my user name and do my taxes, I noted, to my dismay, that I was about to receive more than 3,000 e-mails.

This happens sometimes with Bell. Some glitch in the system tags every e-mail in my account on their server as undelivered, so the server tries to send thousands of messages at one time. Because it can never send them all successfully, every time I contact the server the system tries to send them all again. Long and short of it, after several attempts to clear the glitch I had over 9,000 "unread" messages in my inbox, but still didn't have my user name to do my taxes.

Bell, for its part, provides only the appearance of customer service. They encourage you to call their "24/7" technical support line so that you can hear the recorded message that their offices are now closed. They want you to log onto their live chat service so you can sit for twenty minutes staring at a message that says you're second in line and need wait only one more minute. They provide numerous means to send them e-mail messages so they can ignore them all.

This was driving me crazy. I couldn't get any e-mail because Bell kept trying to send me every e-mail I'd ever been sent for the past three years.  No one at Bell was going to help me.  And I didn't know how to solve the problem.

Then, on Thursday morning when the alarm went off, I got out of bed, put on my slippers, walked down the stairs to the "office", turned on my computer, logged onto the internet, and Googled "Bell Mail." When I got to the Bell Mail site, I logged onto my account. There they were - 3,442 e-mails - with a helpful message from Bell that I had "storage issues." I wiped all the old e-mails off the system and, when I called up my Outlook e-mail and hit "Send/Receive" I got only those e-mails sent to me since Tuesday. Problem solved. Now I get to do my taxes (hooray!).

But how did I know how to do this? Bruce suggested that I had done some "good thinking," but I assured him I had not been "thinking" at all. I'm not sure I was even entirely awake.

What made me take another look in the gutter on Monday night? What "tech support for the collective unconscious" told me what to do on Thursday morning? 

Beats the holy heck out of me. But I really hope that lady makes that donation to the food bank.

Thanks for reading! Have a safe and happy holiday!