A Soft Answer

A soft answer turns away wrath,
But a harsh word stirs up anger.

Proverbs 15:1

 

My Internet service used to be relatively unreliable when I was running it through a cheap, discount store-bought modem.  Due to my daughter's graduate school needs, however, I upgraded several months ago to a better system through my Internet provider.  Since that time, my Internet access has been mostly perfect.

 

Today my daughter went to the gym for her weekend workout with her trainer.  She discovered, at the end of her session, that some things that were promised to her when she signed the very expensive personal training contract were not, in fact, the current policy of the gym.  It appears that it was a "policy" to get her to sign on the dotted line rather than an actual reality.  This circumstance was going to cause some hardship for her over the next two months, and she did not take the news well.  In fact, she blew her top.  After spouting her dissatisfaction to the powers that be, she drove home - calling me on the way to berate the injustices of the system.  I had warned her about this particular gym from previous experience with similar problems, but I managed to keep my mouth shut and just listen.

 

After she arrived home, she grabbed her lap top and proceeded to write a letter to the head of the gym division that is at the root of her problem.  A few minutes later, she asked to read it to me.  When she was finished, I suggested that she wait a bit, calm down, then remove some (all?) of the harsh vitriol from her writing to make it more effective.  She was having none of it.  They deserved her wrath and were going to get it.  She punched the send button, and.... nothing happened.  She tried to send the email again.  It just sat there.  "Mother," she said, "the Internet is not working!"

We went in to the office and fiddled with the network settings on the main desktop, fiddled with her laptop, and then rebooted the modem.  Nothing.  I was leaving to go on a hike, so suggested she wait a while and then try again.  She waited a half hour and tried again.  No luck.  She went about some other tasks, then came back to the email, rebooted again and tried to send it.  As she stewed in frustration over the lack of service, she began to reread the letter, and my advice to tone it down came back to her.  She removed the harsh words and accusations, and added a paragraph apologizing for losing her temper in the gym earlier in the day.

 

When she had finished her revisions, she read through the letter once again, then hit the SEND button.  The usual movement of disappearing email flashed across the screen as her letter sailed into cyberspace.  The Internet was working just fine.