I had a few thing on my list to do today, including trying to recuperate some of the lost time in my editing project. Turns out, I never touched it.
I had a long phone call from the States to discuss a potential future editing project. The call was crystal clear, and I was even able to use my phone as a hotspot to power my desktop browser while on the call with no issues.
This made me thankful for a brother who loves me. Last night near bedtime I received a message from a friend in the States. He wanted to try paying my Bitel bill from there. I hadn’t thunk of that as an option.
We got on a call together. It was kinda spotty service, and we had to repeat ourselves a good bit, but we managed. We went through the process a couple of times, but each time something went wrong. It was somewhat fun to listen to him read the Spanish website options out to me each time. At long last, we made it to the payment page, and he entered his card info.
Uh-oh! His card was flagged as a fraud issue. We’d been expecting this as a possibility. He was able to do a quick bit of communication with the bot who oversees fraud issues, and convinced it all was well. The bot gave him permission to try again.
Half a dozen or so tries into it, we had success! I told him I’d send him a PayPal payment, but he refused. He said he wanted to pay it himself as a gift this time. How sweet!
I hope you find yourself a friend like him.
I finished my sermon prep this afternoon without a hitch. I don’t usually use an internet connection that much for studying, but I need to be able to upload my documents to the cloud as part of my process. Everything functioned far more smoothly than usual.
I think this is due to the message I received after the bill was paid last night. I had received a message from Bitel a few days back, telling me if I paid my bill on time this month, I would receive a promotion. Last night, the message came through, thanking me for paying my bill and promising “200% more data.” I expect this is because many folks are without jobs and are unable to pay this month.
I don’t know if “200% more data” means twice as much data to use or twice as fast speeds, but today I have seen at least twice as fast speeds. In fact, I’m up from 3 Mbps down to pretty nearly 6 Mbps down! Talk about high-speed connections!
Steph and the children worked up in the garden today while I talked and studied in the office. The quiet helped speed things along.
They found some pretty impressive red beets, including one too big to fit in the pressure cooker. We’re curious to see how it will taste.
Juan David 