As Google announces its employees will probably be working from home until next summer, at least, it reminded me of a recent situation.  I was trying to get a hold of a vendor.  I’d email, she’d said she’d called, but I never heard from her.  I know there’s a spam filter for emails, but I couldn’t figure out how I’d missed her phone call while I was sitting at my desk all afternoon.  Finally the light shown through, she emailed me that since she was working from home her number did not come up as the company, but rather ‘private caller,’ (and, like a lot of other people, I don’t answer those).  The next time she called I saw the ‘private caller’ and picked up and solved the issue in 10 minutes.  Just another minor adjustment in our current situation.

While relaying this story to my sister, she told me something similar had happened to her!  A distant relative of our father’s is using the quarantine time to do some genealogy.  My sister received a package with a letter and some old family photos in it.  The letter contained the [third-cousin-twice-removed]’s phone number and my sister recognized it as a call she’d gotten a couple of days earlier but did not answer because she didn’t recognize the number.  Well, now the two have talked, in fact they talk weekly, and we have a new branch of our family tree we’re looking forward to a face-to-face visit as soon as we can.

So, maybe there’s another silver lining to all this. The element of surprise and anticipation is back.  I remember as a kid when the phone would ring everyone would jump up to see who could answer it first.  There was a sense of excitement and mystery:  who was calling us?  We could all use a little more wonder in our lives.  The silver linings are there, we only need to be hopeful and look for them.