Today the funniest not funny thing happened. My router went (professional term) CRAZY and locked us all out of its sacred electronic halls. The problem actually started on Friday. It was slowing down and we would re-boot it and everything would be fine again for a few hours and then we'd have to restart it again. Well we dealt with this all weekend until today, 30 minutes after my wife started working it locked up like a old Dodge out of oil running down the road at 80 miles per hour. BANG, nothing. It took me all evening and a few calls to At&t and Cisco to get the router up and running again. What happened? Honestly, I still don't know. I just know what it took to fix it. But now its running again like it was brand new out of the box.
This reminded me of another story.
There was this large luxurious hotel in New York, and over the summer the owners took the time and money to buy a new boiler and have it installed in their hotel. The old boiler was wearing out as it had given the hotel many good years of service, so the owners called a well known boiler maker in New York and had a custom built boiler crafted on site during the summer to ensure in the following winter months their exacting clientele would have the perfect heating you would expect from a hotel that charges over $300 a night for a stay in their 4 star rooms. The price tag for such a boiler was quite costly as you can imagine. Anyway the boiler was tested and proven to be in perfect working order in July, so when the winter time came and they fired up the boiler, they were quite angry to find no heat was coming out of the ventilation system. The owners called and complained to the boiler makers, whom in response sent a team of technicians out to check the boiler and were shocked to find the boiler was working perfectly. This went on for days. Technicians came and went and it seemed nothing was wrong with the boiler. One day the doorman heard the owners arguing about the boiler as he was opening the door for them and stopped and told them he knew the best boiler repairman in all of New York, he happened to be his dad and he could have him come out and look at it for them. Desperate they agreed and told him to have him come by the next day to look at the boiler. The next day the doorman's father arrived early in the morning. He was a short nondescript kind of guy and he carried a simple small tool box with him. He went downstairs with the owners and they showed him the large boiler and he asked them to be quiet for a moment. He listened to the pipes for a moment and reached into his tool box and pulled out a small hammer. Then he walked over to one of the many valves, listened for a moment and took the hammer and gently tapped it once. Immediately heat flowed from the vents upstairs and throughout the hotel. He put his hammer back into his box and walked upstairs to the lobby. As he was about to leave he handed the owners a bill. The owners were outraged at the cost $1000 for fixing the brand new boiler they had paid so much for. The repairman took the bill back and wrote on it for a second and handed it back. The bill read: Fee for tapping the pipe to fix the boiler $1.00, Fee for knowing where to tap hammer to fix the boiler $999.00. The hotel owners paid the man summarily and he was on his way.
The problems we all have sometimes are like the new boiler. Knowing what the problem is, is often obvious. Knowing how to fix them is often difficult, and most times only requires a small amount of effort. But knowing both can make all the difference in the world.
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