The Virtues of Volunteerism

Since my retirement over 4 years ago, I have involved myself in a number of activities, i.e. babysitting grandchildren, subbing, volunteer work, home projects, etc. Among those things, babysitting grandchildren has been the most enjoyable and second to that is my volunteer work. Just this morning I met with a 91 year old lady who was struggling with some computer problems. She uses a computer as much as possible because she's determined to keep her mind active. Also, it's the best way to keep in touch with children and grandchildren. Anyway, the reason she called me was because she was having problems with email. She uses MS Outlook which is generally a very reliable and easy to use program. She said she keeps getting error messages but she doesn't know why. When I sat down to do a little troubleshooting I found that the program worked just fine but when I looked in her 'draft' folder, I found over 4000 error messages. It seems when there's an undeliverable email it gets bounced back to the user's 'draft' folder in Outlook. What she had been doing was mistyping people's email addresses so naturally they wouldn't go through. The system got so clogged with undeliverable messages that it kept asking her if she wanted her to delete them. To make a long story short, I told her what was going on and gave her a little basic computer inservice. She didn't realize that computers don't know when someone has made a typo. After I explained how everything works, she was extremely grateful. You'd think I cured her of some horrible affliction. I find this to be true of all the people I help. It doesn't take much to make people happy. What we take for granted is extremely important for others. That's why I volunteer.