Tuesday, September 24, 2013


I’ve been having a spate of electric and electronic difficulties lately. My first problem, occurring more that a month ago, was my old TV set, which I use for playing DVD’s and VCR’s. That was relatively minor and eventually solved by switching remotes. The next problem, a more serious one, occurred when the breaker for the kitchen circuit in my house tripped during the night several times over the period of a few weeks. I’d find out about it in the morning, check the circuit, find nothing wrong, reset the breaker and have no difficulty—for several days. Then it would happen again. Finally one morning I found a night light I have plugged into an outlet above a counter no longer worked. I unplugged it and discovered the case of it cracked. Could this be the cause of my problem? I bought a new night light, plugged it in and no more tripped breakers. All problems solved, I thought.

Not so.

The next thing to give me problems was my scanner. That was reasonable. The scanner was old and had done good service. I got it working long enough to finish a job or two before it finally stopped doing anything. Nothing to do but buy a new one. Simple. But scanners are different now. They’re combined with printers and other devices that make it possible to print, FAX, telegraph and contact Mars all at the same time through the use of one bulky machine. To make a long story short, I had a time finding a scanner that was not joined with any other machine just like the trusty one that had given such good service for so many years. I did, though, and had then solved all my problems.

Again not so—my printer ran out of black ink. Solution? Simple. Fill the cartridge. I’d done that many times. Only this time it didn’t work. None of my old tricks worked. I couldn’t get the cartridge to work, either. I finally sent it off to a firm that fills cartridges and in several days it came back good as new. Now, all the problems were solved. Nope. The color cartridge ran out of ink. I took on the job of filling it with great trepidation. Could anything go wrong with this operation? It did. I thought I’d messed up and ruined the cartridge. I didn’t have the patience to fool around too long. I just sent the cartridge off to the ink people and, lo and behold, it came back in first rate shape. I’d had enough of problems, however. I got two extra cartridges, one color and one black. I got a spare cartridge for my black and white printer, too. No more interruptions were to be tolerated.
Everything was now operational.

Then the speaker on my cell phone quit. No way to fix it. I accepted the inevitable and got a new phone. The first day I had it I lost it. I never before lost a cell phone but I managed to lose this one. That is the most recent of my electric/electronic problems.

I have been trying to make some sense out of this sequence of events. I believe there is significance in everything that happens. What about this? Electricity is energy. Maybe there is something amiss with the energy of my life—too little or not directed appropriately? Am I misusing it or wasting it? The devices that were affected had to do with communication of one type or another. My main activity in life is writing. That’s a form of communication. Is there something wrong there? Is it the writing itself or perhaps the way I’m using it. I think there’s something to that—something that I don’t, at the present, understand. I’ll have to think about that. As Richard Bach wrote, (and I paraphrase), there is never a prob1em (or a series of them) that does not have a gift for you in its hands.