Language Barriers

I am posting this from my house! Praise the Lord I finally have internet in my own home! But this isn't to say that there weren't many trials along the way.

I showed back up at work on Thursday after a nice couple of days in the city of Sapporo. On my desk is an envelope from the internet company. My boss tells me to just fill it all in and I should be good to go. No problem, right? Wrong. If you've ever watched me try to fill out forms in English, you know it's trouble. I'm just bad at filling in the blanks. I always second guess my answer (I don't know why because usually the question is "Where were you born?" and I never know what to write down). Anyways, try doing it in all Japanese after you've been speaking English for 4 straight days. My brain was not functioning in Japanese mode at all. It took me about 4.5 hours to fill in the 20 blanks on my internet form. Good to go, right?

I came home for lunch and had this nifty little CD and a paper with a whole bunch of numbers and crazy looking log-on names. I just popped the CD in and assumed it would be a piece of cake and I'd be on Facebook in no time. Wrong again. The CD was all in Japanese (obviously I live in Japan). So I made it through the first couple of set-up pages and then I got stuck. There was no "NEXT" button on the bottom of the page and it said something about a security setting. Talk about bummer. I was SO CLOSE! Needless to say, I returned to the office somewhat distraught and somewhat relieved.

Relieved? Yeah, I've complained a lot about being bored after work and whatnot, but it has been nice with no internet. It just makes life a little more difficult but I've definitely had a chance to spend more time with God than I ever imagined. God and I had a long discussion about whether or not He wanted me to have internet at my house. I was pretty sure at this point that His answer was "No, not now, maybe later."

Anyways, I decided I would come home from work and try it again. But again, it failed. So I was resolved to ask my boss to come and help me. The day before he told me would if I needed help. But I came to work this morning and no boss. All morning. I went to lunch and came back and he still wasn't there. So I asked the cool guy behind me if he knew how to do it. He called the helpline for me and then we drove to my house and he sat on the floor trying to get the CD to work.

This is where the crazy language barrier comes up. My problem was that I couldn't read the characters on the CD. His problem was that he couldn't read my computer. So we sat on my floor for a good 45 minutes looking things up in our dictionaries trying to get the CD to work and the internet to load. We ended up calling the helpline again and they told us we didn't need the CD. But the internet is finally working and it's fantastic and PRAISE THE LORD FOR TECHNOLOGY!