I wanted to buy an airline ticket for my 16-year-old granddaughter, to come home for (Canadian) Thanksgiving, using the points on my credit card.
The credit card company recommends making bookings online.
They add a surcharge to discourage telephone bookings.
So I found the flights online. I chose the dates. I couldn’t complete the booking. The program denied access. It slapped my wrist, so to speak.
So I dialled the number on the back of my credit card.
I was expecting trouble. Sadly, I expect any negotiation with a giant corporation to be more a curse than a blessing. Especially if I have to converse with a synthetic voice that’s supposed to pick up keywords in my answers and respond intelligently.
Instead, I got an amazing agent.
She couldn’t book my flights either, because her company has rules against issuing tickets for unaccompanied minors. But she set up an end-run around the system so that I could book my granddaughter’s flights directly with the airline, and then get points applied against my payment.
The airline agent was equally helpful.
The transaction took an entire morning on the telephone. But instead of having to beat my way through an impenetrable thicket of rules and regulations, the two of them made it easy. Even pleasant.
I thanked them both, just in case these calls were – as we’re often advised – “recorded for monitoring and training purposes…”
Later that week, a priest urged, “Count your blessings; too often, we let our blessings slip by, unnoticed.”
I hadn’t thought of those phone calls as blessings. But they were.
I don’t often recognize the telephone itself as a blessing. But later that same day, I got a call from an old friend on the other side of the country.
Without the phone, we might never have made contact again.
That was a blessing.
Hot running water is a blessing when I scrub my pots and pans in the sink.
When I sit down to watch the nightly news – although I have doubts about endless newscasts being a blessing — my dog lies on the floor and lays her head on my foot. She is definitely a blessing.
The Canadian medical system is a blessing.
Even though most people would want to avoid it, the experience of looking after my wife in the final months of her life was a blessing.
Having friends is a blessing.
Masks are a blessing when they protect my health and the health of my loved ones. And hearing aids are a blessing when those masks conceal people’s lips.
Just being alive is a blessing.
The words of an old song come back to me: “Count your blessings, name them one by one…” Thanks to that priest’s comment, I now realize that my blessings don’t have to be big things like winning a lottery or falling in love. Many blessings are the little things, the overlooked things, the everyday things.
Whether or not I attribute those blessings to some beneficent “Lord” pulling strings, the important thing is I recognize them as blessings. I am grateful for them. And that I radiate that gratitude so I might also be a blessing to others.
Jim Taylor lives in Lake Country.
rewrite@shaw.ca