Peace in the Kingdom

It is 8:12 AM and I am ready to go back to bed. Maggie left at 7:25 and I have a laundry list of things to get dome this morning, but I am exhausted. I have already put in a full day of thinking.

Maggie’s newly repaired Dynavox arrived yesterday. I waited around for UPS all day because I had to be here to sign for it. (Of course, they arrived at 5:45 PM). It comes back wiped clean so I had to reload all her information. I carefully loaded all Maggie's settings to a flash drive and put them on the repaired machine.. I was patting myself on the back so hard I may have reinjured my shoulder.

The repaired device arrived just in time because the loaner machine has been acting up in the past few days.. One of the switches would not work at all. Maggie could scroll through all the choices with one switch, but when she went to select nothing happened. This was extremely irritating for her, which means it was miserable for the nurse and for me. We were trying to convince her we could fix it but we were really just resetting it every few minutes.

The repaired one worked fine – for about 20 minutes. The same thing started happening. I could not believe it. It had to be a faulty switch. I have a couple of spares downstairs and Steve changed it for me. It has to be screwed on to the tray. (He is in charge of all crafty things as well as things involving tools or manual dexterity).  

New switch plugged in and same problem.  Arrrgh.

 By now, it is 9:30PM and Maggie is both tired AND mad. I told her we had to call the company and see what to do.  She was smashing her fist into her tray saying NO NO NO.  The thought of Maggie without any communication device all weekend was not pretty.  

I woke up at 4:45 for some unknown reason and as I tried to get back to sleep I found myself thinking about the dynavox problem.  It suddenly dawned on me that perhaps when I copied and pasted the settings from one device to the other, I loaded some erroneous code onto the repaired device.  The tech support opens at 8:00AM EST, which just happens to be 5:00AM here. I could call right away and get this fixed before Maggie went to school. I hopped out of bed. 

Let’s say that again. Tech support at 5:00AM. The coffee was still brewing and my cup of tea was not shaking the cobwebs from the brain. My tech support person, Eric, was great, but I had to tell him to slow down a few times and remind him of the time difference. We did trouble shooting on various things. He asked about the switch and I said, proudly, "no, I thought of that and I just changed it."  I gave him my theory about loading bad settings onto the repaired machine. He politely said, perhaps, but that really does not make sense. We tried some more things.  After about 40 minutes, he said, “I think we’ve isolated this to the switch.”

 Harrumph, I thought, how can that be. I just changed it.   I padded down to the deepest bowels of the basement to find the last switch in the box. I plugged it in and VOILA!  Success! The brand new switch was faulty.  My supply is now gone and I have to order more (at $30each!) but Maggie went off to school with a working communication device. 

Thus, the weekend in the Kingdom of Maggie will be peaceful; she can sit on her throne and issue edicts to us, her lowly subjects..  

Have a nice weekend. Enjoy the World Cup finals. We are rooting for the Netherlands to honor my Dutch grandmother.