More alarms at night

This week is made up of a series of informal meetings, in person and on the phone. Thus far, at least one of the meeting participants has been late and flustered. Half of the time it's the other person; the other half of the time, it's me. Which makes me want to be very understanding and humble in those instances in which I'm the organized, on-time party.

This reminds me of the advice Ernest Thompson, the marvelous dean of Erza Stiles College, gave us in his retirement speech: "Be kind to one another."

Many of the emails I received today were particularly intense. People were reporting deaths in their families, sending me compliments, asking me out to lunch, and offering me assistance. So I spent more time than usual trying to answer attentively and appropriately. I have some amazing friends!

There was an email from my mom tonight that made my hair stand on end. In it she casually mentioned that she'd gotten an odd phone call from her bank this evening and had given out some of her account information before she began to suspect it wasn't her bank, and hung up on them. She said she was going to call the bank when they opened in the morning to see if there was a problem. Eeek! 

I called her in Florida (fortunately she stays up late) and insisted she call the bank's 24-hour 1-800 number immediately to freeze the account. She just called back to say she'd called them, they didn't have any evidence of usual activity, and they had frozen the account. Whew. Now I think I'll just stop reading email for the evening...