Shrug Your Shoulders and Move On......

One of the joys of living in a small and remote community is that sometimes when things go wrong, all you can do it shake your head and shrug your shoulders, because there's nothing else to do.  This morning on my way inside the school, the principal mentioned to me that the phones were all out.  No service whatsoever.  Great!  Does anybody have any idea why it happened? No.  Does anybody know when service will be restored? No.  Doesn't that bother anybody? No, not really.  It happens from time to time.  You have to admit that if we didn't have phone service in Southern Ontario, we'd all freak out pretty quickly, and even worse would be to have a cell tower knocked out somewhere!  Up here, you just shrug your shoulders.

Yesterday I had an appointment with the Health Centre and while I was waiting to be seen, the receptionist received a phone call from the airport in Inuvik that the remainder of the planes scheduled to fly to Tuk that afternoon were cancelled due to foggy conditions between Tuk and Inuvik.  There were people who were scheduled to fly out to Inuvik to see a visiting specialist at the hospital there, but since the flights weren't going, they were going to miss the appointments, and therefore had to be rescheduled to the next time the specialist was going to be in town.  When the receptionist starting make her calls, everybody was complacent about it.  What can you do? Shrug your shoulders, and move on.

Greg just returned from an emergency trip for spaghetti sauce at Stanton's, one of the local grocers.  Apparently the phone lines are still down, and debit cards run on......phone lines, and the ATM machine runs on a......yeah, you know.  Since most people up here pay with debit, what to do?  Well, we happen to be friends with the Manager of Stanton's, who told his cashier, "Put it on his account!", so now we have an account at the grocery store.  That's good to know.

Since the phones are out and nobody can pay anybody up here, I wonder what kind of day it has been for the community?  I had a collection of 'behaviour' phone calls to make to parents, whose little darlings had violated the Discipline Policy at the school, which necessitates a phone call home to parents to make them aware of the situation.  Nope.  Shrug your shoulders and move on.

All I can say is, thank goodness we have a cell phone, because if our internet and cell phone weren't working, I would be pretty upset.  It's one thing to work in a remote community, but it's another thing to FEEL like you work in a remote community when you really ARE shut off to the outside world!

For most people in Tuk, the day did go on as usual.  The water truck made its deliveries, the sewage truck did too.....from what I could smell, the stores were open, the Health Centre was open, the school had a regular day, and as for the phones - oh well.  They'll be up and running......eventually.