I received the most wonderful Christmas present from our friend Mike: a wood-splitting ax, specifically made for splitting kindling. It was made at a Swedish forge by a blacksmith who signed his name. It is a beautiful tool.
I will take it outside the house soon. But at the moment I have put it where my computer can see it.
Right before I download an attachment from email, an extremely necessary but recently problematic operation that has slowed down the newspaper production, I look meaningfully at the ax and then back at the computer screen, and I say, “Strike any key.”
It only works sometimes.
It was on a bad day in the week before the Christmas issue that my Yahoo business account tried to prevent you all from getting your papers, but it was also the day I met Simon, who used to be a chef and had a bad cold.
That’s what I learned about him while he was trying to figure out why I couldn’t read email attachments on the precise day when advertisers, photographers, story contributors and others who communicate with the paper were trying to send me their stuff.
Simon, as he worked on my computer, mercifully did not ask me about Sarah Palin or Snowzilla the Illegal Anchorage Yard Ornament—the only things lower 48ers knew about Alaskans that week. Simon did volunteer that he was tired of hearing about the national economy and how bad it is. I didn’t ask him if the economy had anything to do with him not being a chef anymore. I think he was about to offer that up, but my computer problem was getting more mysterious and therefore more fascinating for him.
What we arrived at, on that dark day in December, is that Yahoo engineers would have to fix the problem. Simon said my computer problem was strange enough and difficult enough that they might name it after me. And then he forwarded all my mail to another mailbox, and for about an hour and a half the only person who could send me an email was Simon.
He proved this by sending me everything on his tech help computer except for proprietary secrets of the Yahoo engineers. If anyone wants to know how to open their garage door with their iPhone or wants a cheese-cakey looking photograph of a guy named Ray, just ask me.
Simon may have sensed that the dangerous emotional state of transference was taking place between us as I helplessly turned over my passwords to him one by one. In sending “Ray,” perhaps Simon was trying to hold me at tech help arms length. He knew I was falling for him as I listened to his deep sympathetic mellifluous voice and his ready explanation of every dialog box on my screen.
He did say, as he explained finally that he couldn’t fix my email problem, “well, we’ve been together for nearly two hours.”
“I know,” I said. “I feel like I should ask you for some recipes.”
“I have some good ones,” he said.
We had to leave it there, in spite of the fact that he knows my date of birth and my high school mascot.
But my email stayed broken all the way through the Christmas issue of the Copper River Record. I got really tired of throwing salt over my shoulder, doing the hoochie coochie, and standing on my head every time I needed to open an attachment.
After Christmas I called Yahoo back.
If you’ve ever called Yahoo, you’ll know they think it is very clever to yell “Yahoooooooooooooooooooooo!” in your ear like Tony Curtis blowing the lonesome Viking horn at a dead departing Kirk Douglas on his way out at sea in a burning dragon boat.
I rubbed my ear.
Next, in spite of the fact that Yahoo employs hundreds of people to not quite solve your computer problems, I got Simon.
“Simon Johnson?” I asked.
“How did you know my last name?” he asked.
“My email box is full of messages from you,” I said. “You used to be a chef.” And because I cared about Simon, I said, “And your cold sounds better.”
He remembered me then, and looked up my ticket number and apologized profusely when he saw that the Yahoo engineers had marked me “resolved” when I wasn’t solved at all. He promised me that the engineers would make my email work as it was supposed to again—immediately.
And he made me promise him that if I ever called tech help again and he answered—that I would pick out some lottery numbers for him. It was kind of romantic.
Well, I’m a happily married woman and he has Ray, so I wouldn’t want fate to throw us together like that and screw everything up.
So if the engineers don’t fix my problem soon, I’m going to get a bigger ax.