“If I had no sense of humor, I would long ago have committed suicide.” Mahatma Gandhi

An African-American, disabled, low-income woman friend asked me if I would drive her to a mall to pick up a phone from wireless company. She had worked it out over the phone with the company so all she had to do is go to the store for the new one and get a label for a box to return the old phone. She has an aide for over 5 hours a day but the one this Saturday did not drive.

So I picked up her and her aide and using her van/truck, since she needs to lie down in the back seat, drove them to the wireless store in the mall. The wireless store made us wait for a long time even though my friend explained that she cannot sit for long period of times in the wheel chair due to her severe nerve problems and pain.

Finally someone call her name and all was going well till his computer told him that she could not get the new phone until after they received the old one in the mail. After talking with a supervisor and someone at main company, and quite a bit of time, this obstacle was cleared.

Now an hour and half had passed and the issue became downloading from the ‘cloud’ her over 600 contacts to the new phone. I knew this was important since several times driving her to medical appointments I noticed she was calling the doctors’ office to say we would be late or contact a caregiver about some changes. The mobile phone was in many ways her contact with outside world. After another long period of time the customer service people came back to say they were experiencing some network problems and would not be able to complete the download at this time. She would need to come back. This was a major problem for my friend and she is a strong person and insisted there be another way.

With all the medicines she takes she cannot go long periods of time without food. So I ran over to the food court in the mall to get her a mini-sub to keep her strength up. She finally got on the phone again with the main company and after a long time of waits, conversations with her and customer service on the phone, with staff at the store and staff at store with the main company some resolution was achieved.

She is one person that does not need me to advocate for her so I just resorted to a corner of the store to wait. I was in a wireless store but noticed that it had no public Wi-Fi network for me to use. The food court area had Wi-Fi but the wireless store did not. Her aide was by her side and when they finally came by to get me over 3 hours had passed since we got to store. I had left my house around 12:30 and came home around 6pm.

What kept us, she, her aide and I going was, in part, a sense of humor. Some young man tried to pick up the aide, there were many jokes about my driving and talking about food when we all so hungry. We joked about the long wait in the store. After I made a wrong turn on the way back she joked about me costing her a lot of gas for her van/truck. I shout back for her to take it off my pay, which just involved God’s blessings she shared with me for helping her. I told her please not to take away too many blessings since I needed all I could get.

I had plans for the afternoon but was lucky to make it home by 6pm for a wonderful dinner Pat had prepared. Tonight we watched a movie about Stephen Hawking called “The Theory of Everything” The movie puts any frustrations and hardships we have in life in perspective of the life of Stephan Hawking and his former wife Jane, who wrote the book on which the film was based.

Tonight a friend who had written a series of essays that we published on www.nonviolentcow.org called the Father at War wrote the book was going to be published as an E Book. That makes me feel good that his web site had contributed to the publication.

What I did not do today perhaps I will do tomorrow or perhaps not. Pat and I are scheduled to visit another disabled friend after Church and who knows where that will take us. But despite the long waits and frustrations people in need experience I, a middle class old white guy, can say “All Is Well” thanks to a sense of humor and the blessings God gives to my friends to share with me.

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