Another Thing About Our Fourth Of July

This is almost a non-event.

But…

A few weeks ago Ginny found a computer thing laying on the grocery story parking lot. I think it’s called a zip drive, about the size and shape of a disposal cigarette lighter; it plugs into a computer USB port and holds scads of files.

Ginny brought it home and Donald hooked it up to a computer to see if he could identify the owner and we could return it.

Turns out the thing contained many military files. Obviously it had been lost by someone stationed at a local base.

Donald discovered the name of the officer – lets give him a good biblical name… say, Zechariah – and we looked for that name in a local phone book. Called the number. Got a recording saying no incoming calls were accepted.

We tried several ways to get in touch with this officer but no luck.

I tried contacting the base locator office, the chaplain, and the base computer security lab – no luck with any of them.

Then a new phone book came out. We had an address.

My daughter Eve drove me by there and the house looked abandoned so I left a note in the door.

Sunday when we returned from our outing at the Kingsley Plantation, there was a message on our phone answering machine. Zechariah responding to my note on his door.

He’d been out of town and was on his way to the base to hunt for the very files we held. He said these files were vital to his teaching a class for pilots tomorrow.

Since I had not been able to locate the disc thing’s owner, I’d been tempted to overwrite his files and replace them with some of my own but because I know what pain it is to loose computer files as I did and have been bitching about for six weeks, I held on to this officer’s files without disturbing them.

He drove immediately to our house to pick up his computer drive. He was very thankful to have them back because he needed them for his pilots’ class.

Those files may make a big difference in somebody’s effectiveness in our military.

Ginny, Donald, Helen, Eve and I all feel good about the tiny bit we did to support our troops – and we all feel that it was cool for all this to work out on the Fourth Of July weekend.