A little unusual

I'm just back from the neighbour's place where I enjoyed three back-to-back episodes of "The Cosby Show"! Remember that show? They sure don't make TV like they used to!

The fashion, the humour... it's just great! And so amazingly clean.

Now Zane is having another round with my mossy net on my bed - I'm really going to have to get a new net next year, I think, if I want to keep the mossies out of my bed. Once he settles down, I'll type out the story of my rather unusual phone call today.

We have this phone in our office - it's sorta like a cell phone (no landlines here!) but looks like a "real" phone that you'd have sitting on your desk. It's quite useful, but no one ever, ever uses it, since most of us have our own personal cell phones which are just easier to use. Plus the office phone uses a network which is always terrible - you can hardly hear anything when you use it.

Being the extrovert that I am, I love it when that phone rings! It rings maybe like, once every month or two. And often, it's a wrong number, or just a text message from the phone network telling us about some special offer (which is usually in Arabic, so I can't read it anyways!). So you can imagine my surprise when there was a real person on the other end. I put on my polite "office receptionist" voice and proceeded to try to figure out who this guy was and what in the world he would want and why on earth he was calling on this office phone.

Well, you believe it, it was someone from the office of a rather high-up person in the Ministry of Education (like, um, the second in command - the guy just below the Minister himself - the guy who signs all the letters and gets everything done). He told me to stay by the phone, because this VIP was going to call back in a few minutes. At least, that's what I think he said. It all caught me a bit off-guard, and plus, the network was pretty terrible, so it was a bit difficult to decipher what the guy meant.

Anyways, I said goodbye to this chap, and just waited for the phone to ring again. Sure enough, after about 20 minutes, the phone rang again, and it was the office manager again. All he said was, "Here's the [name of position] for you".

And sure enough again, it was this guy on the phone. "Hello, Tanya," he said, "this is MM [using his first name to identify himself]." He inquired about how things were going, and how Jackie's doing. Then he proceeded to quite effusively thank me and appreciate me for working on his computer last week! I had installed the software and fonts so that he can type his language on his computer, as well as cleaning it of several nasty viruses etc. He was so appreciative of the work we'd done for him!

He then asked if he could bring his computers over to our office to use the Internet sometime. Sure, I said. If the guy wants to hang out at our compound and use our Internet, who am I to stop him!? I tried to give him some directions, and told him about someone that we work with in the Ministry who could come with him to show him the way to our office (it's rather difficult to find our place, since we're not on any main roads and there's not exactly any street names around these parts!).

Again, he thanked me for all we do to help, and said he would come 'round the office. We said goodbye and that was that. My personal phone call from the Big-wig. Imagine. I work in a place where the Second-in-command (at the National Ministry of Education) calls us personally to thank us for a job well done. How do I get myself into these things?! I mean, can you just imagine that happening in our own country? Somehow, I just don't think I rank at home like I do here. Scary stuff, I tell you.

But I'm thanking the Lord for this new guy in this position. I've already talked to the new guy more in the few weeks he's been in office than I talked to the old guy in the previous three years! This new one is so friendly and personable. Hopefully this means he'll also read some of the documents and policy guidelines we've been working on, and will be on our side when we start planning some more activities with the Ministry!