April 28, 2010

Phreaking, Reminiscing, and Googling

I spent much of today in a state of under-productivity due to having to wait around for the phone guy, who never came. I have quite a few irons in the fire with Verizon right now; two old POTS lines that mysteriously ring busy when called, and another account which they have turned over to collection for a phone line I have never been able to find or determine has ever been in service. We should have got rid of all this old cruft when we put in the T-1, but I digress into phreaky rant.

Anyway, in my idleness, I was thinking about Confirmation last night and thought back to my own Confirmation. I was twenty years old and a junior in college. I was appended to the year's crop of ordinary confirmandi at the parish near school. At the time they seemed like kids; there's a big difference between twenty and fourteen. But time softens age gaps, and today I was thinking about how my Confirmation classmates must all be around thirty-two by now. I wondered what had happened to them; if any had become famous or infamous, or entered religious life or the priesthood. I took out the program from that night and googled them. Almost all had Facebook profiles. One was a professor of government somewhere. One had been arrested for some kind of tax problem with his restaurant.

So I prayed for all of us, for the continued grace of the Spirit in our journey, the Confirmation class of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, Quaker Hill, Connecticut, December 11th, 1992

7 comments:

Elizabeth Mahlou said...

I think following our peers' lives is fascinating. God gives each of such a personalized and individualized path through life. How nice that you prayed for them.

Qualis Rex said...

Oh, my. How Breakfast Club!

(*cue "Simple Minds" background music*)

Brother Charles said...

Luckily for me, I missed the Breakfast Club, which appeared right after I dropped out of popular culture and become a heavy metal kid.

JanineD said...

Father. If you go to the phone company's network interface, there should be a place where you can hook up a regular phone with a cord into the phone jack there and see if they ring. If they do, it might be a shorted wire inside the building causing it to ring busy. Hopefully they marked where the 2 broken phone lines go so you can tell which number to call, and maybe the one that you are being billed for will appear there too.

Brother Charles said...

Thanks, Janine, for the help. Unfortunately, the lines I'm worried about don't seem to be marked, so I'm just looking at a forest of wires bundled into various holes in the back of a closet. I'm stumped!

JanineD said...

Father, I am sorry that they arent marked. Did the phone company ever show up?

Brother Charles said...

No, they didn't. But I'll be calling them again on Monday. >(