Some people are so nice!
Today I got called to help a patron, who is also the spouse of a woman I've known for years, with an email problem. Usually, I dread these kinds of calls for help because it invariably involves trying to retrieve something from a webmail account like Yahoo or Hotmail that has "vanished" while they were typing. You just can't do that, and I hate delivering the bad news.
This time was different. This patron had sent off a test, in Spanish, to a school in Mexico. This test will be used to place him in the appropriate level class when he and his wife arrive in Mexico next week for their Spanish immersion class. She faxed hers, but he had decided to send his in via email - a wonder in itself since he only recently learned to even use the internet and webmail. He was concerned because his "sent items" folder did not show the email he was sure he'd sent to this school. Fortunately, a copy of the completed test was saved in a folder in his webmail. Apparently, some friend who was helping him did that for him. Since the mail did not appear to have been sent, I was simply going to help him resend it. But upon inspection of the saved test, we realized that several questions had no answers typed in. I decided I'd just copy and paste the text into Word so he could type in the missing data, and then we'd just email it as an attachment. I got the document copied into word, fixed the header's formatting, and left him to type away.
A short time later I was buzzed by the info desk. Could I please come help him again? So downstairs I went. He told me that while he was typing in the missing data, it suddenly appeared in the document! I sat down to figure out what the heck was going on. It turns out that the document's format was so messed up from trying to put it into the body of his webmail, that the data was in all the wrong places. Fortunately, it just involved doing a lot of cutting and pasting - something he was not yet capable of doing. Knowing that his time was running out, I sat down, and with him at my side and his handwritten test in his hands, I proceeded to cut and paste and arrange the data as it was intended to be arranged. I showed him how to put Word into Spanish mode so he could put all the accent marks on the words too. It took about 35 or 40 minutes, but we got it done. I then saved it for him, attached it to a new email, and emailed it off to the school. He was so relieved! I was happy to help. In the process of doing all this, I was happily surprised by just how much Spanish I still remembered. I could read the entire test, and even knew the answers to the questions! Too bad I have such a hard time speaking Spanish these days.
About an hour later, I was called to the upstairs info desk. The staff person said "there is a girl out here you need to see"... okay... what's up with that? I walked down the hall where I was met by a gal with a vase of flowers. She asked if I was Gina (my name tag says I am). I looked at her, puzzled. She smiled and handed me the vase, filled with beautiful spring-like flowers and smelling divine. I looked at the card. It said "Es un milagro! Mil Gracias!" and was signed by the patron and his wife. Now how great is that?! I called them and left them a thank you. It made my day.
