I'm just getting on my computer for the first time this morning at about
8:30. I usually don't deal with email this early, either reading or
sending, but since it had just been a topic of discussion I thought I
would drop by anyway to give you guys an update on my phone situation.
When I have a power failure my phone sits there and chirps at me. I call
it a chirp because that is what it sounds like as opposed to other
electronic sounds. That seems to be its way of announcing that it is not
getting any electricity. In this most recent phone crisis it has been
chirping at me too, but I did not associate it with a lack of power. For
one thing, I was not having a power failure. And also that is because
during one of those power outages the chirping is more regular. That is,
each chirp sounds alike, has the same duration and the spacing between
chirps seems to be constant. In this case neither the duration nor the
spacing of the chirps seemed to be constant. Sometimes it seemed that a
chirp would be cut off in the middle. Sometimes a lot of the chirps
sounded more like beeps to me. And sometimes there would be long pauses
before there was another chirp and other times they were spaced close
together. And, of course, the problem was sporadic. I could still make
and receive calls, but only sometimes. If it was chirping I learned that
I could not and when it was not chirping it worked sometimes. Often when
I picked up the phone after not having heard a chirp for some time it
wouldn't work and that prompted it to start chirping again. Sometimes
there would be an incoming call and it seemed that the ring was abruptly
cut off before I could get to it. None of that sounded like a power
issue to me and I called the phone company twice and both times they
came out and worked on the line and it did not fix the problem. But last
night, for a while, it started sounding exactly like it sounds when I
have a power outage. That made me wonder if it might actually not be
getting a steady flow of electricity. So at about 10:30 last night I
started wrestling with a bookcase. The phone plugs into an outlet behind
a big and heavy bookcase and I had to pull that out and away from the
wall. I had to be really careful too because moving it caused it to be
on the verge of falling over and if that had happened I would have had a
real mess to clean up and if it had fallen on me I expect that I would
have been injured. After I got it moved I then had to make my way
through the cobwebs to the outlet. I gave the plug a really hard push.
It didn't move much, but I did feel it move and that let me know that I
did tighten it up at least somewhat. So I wrestled the bookcase back
into place and noted that the phone was not chirping. I picked it up and
got a dial tone. That was nothing to celebrate because it had been
sporadically working anyway. Midnight came and I had not heard any
further chirping and I was about to go to bed, but I made one last check
before I got to bed. I made a call. I explained that I was just testing
it and didn't have time to talk because I was about to get some sleep.
Well, here it is the next morning and it is still working just fine. It
looks like I solved the problem. The plug was loose. Okay, I suppose I
will continue to look into mobile phones. After all, it is becoming
harder and harder to function without one and everyone just assumes that
everyone has one, but now the sense of urgency is gone. I can take my
time and go back to using my land line phone like I usually do. By the
way, right after finding out that I had been hearing certain song lyrics
wrong for some fifty years I now find out that my phone problem was a
simple loose plug. A lot of things are piling up to make me feel stupid.
I wonder if I am facing dementia.
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Irvin D. Yalom “Truth," Nietzsche continued, "is arrived at through
disbelief and skepticism, not through a childlike wishing something were
so! Your patient's wish to be in God's hands is not truth. It is simply
a child's wish—and nothing more! It is a wish not to die, a wish for the
eveastingly bloated nipple we have labeled 'God'! Evolutionary theory
scientifically demonstrates God's redundancy—though Darwin himself had
not the courage to follow his evidence to its true conclusion. Surely,
you must realize that we created God, and that all of us together now
have killed him.” ― Irvin D. Yalom, When Nietzsche Wept