Distance.

I’m sure anyone who travels a lot eventually reaches a point where they get used to it; the actual travel becomes less noticeable, the process less sacred and more commonplace. I mean, I have a few friends who have jetsetted a fair bit recently, back and forth across the continent for work, or even overseas.

So yeah, my traveling by train in one direction or the other across Southern Ontario isn’t such a big deal, and I dare say I’ve reached that point, too. But there were a couple of times this past weekend (my weekends are now Sunday through Tuesday) that I really felt a sense of the distance I’ve traveled… really felt quite far from home, far from where I lay myself to rest.

The first such time I felt far from home happened on Monday evening as I was going for a walk through Aurora with Nicole, having accompanied her there for her to teach in a music school. The second time was tonight, as I got home to London and felt far away from Nicole.

Tales from Tech Support.

I had this one guy call in today, thick Jamaican accent. He tells me he can’t connect to the Internet, so I starts the standard troubleshooting… asking him when things last worked for him, asking about his home network, running line tests and the like.

The tests I run are perfect. I tell him so, and ask him to open his web browser, let me know when the homepage or error loads up. He doesn’t make a sound for quite some time, so I ask him how it’s going. “It didna load up.” So I ask him about clearing out the address bar, and he tells me he can’t find it, simply reads this msg, “finds and displays information and Web sites on the Internet.”

So I realize he hasn’t even opened it, as he’s reading off to me every icon he has on his desktop. I try to tell him to double-click it, but I can hear the clicks - slower than scheisse. So yeahs, I manage to talk him into restarting his computer, and we try again.

So I’ve been on the phone with him for 25-30 minutes, easily, before I manage to coax him to click on it once, and then press the Enter key. And though by this point I was understanding him perfectly, I have never heard exclamations of joy the likes of which came next when he was able to “connect to da Intahnet.”