Jami Has Not Vanished, I Promise

Sigh, so the place we stayed did not have an internet connection that I could access. That's the first week I was missing. Then we got home and apparently the extended power outage we missed turned off our wireless connection, which took us a good time to figure out and that confused our poor wireless card, which had to be uninstalled and reinstalled and at that point I had, I don't know, a bazillion emails. Plus, on the work front, my division has been sold, so I had to attend online training sessions. This is not fun. Not that training is ever a hoot, but when training the wide variety of people in our company, it's sort of like being in one of those old-fashioned one room school houses, you know? Where I'm the teenager who is listening in on the teacher working with the little ones. Think I'm being arrogant? Here's the actual conversation that started one of the conference calls that I was on - the instructions we received ended with "Once you are connected, please mute your phone. If your phone does not have a mute button, you can use *6 to mute it for the conference. *6 again will unmute it for questions". I connect, mute my phone and hear: Man 1: Hello?? Am I in the right place? Is this (company name) training? Woman 1: Yes. Please mute your phone because there are going to be close to 100 people on this call and the background noise becomes distracting. You can unmute it for the Q&A. Man 1: Should I mute it now? Woman 2: Hello? Is this the training thing? Man 1: Yes. Should we mute our phones? Woman 1: Yes, please use *6 to mute your phone. (long pause) Woman 2: It's not working! Man 1: I should mute my phone now? Won't there be role-call? Woman 1: No role call, we can see who is connected. Please mute your phone. Woman 2: I'm trying to mute my phone, but it's not working. I pushed the star and the 6 and nothing happened. I did it a bunch of times. Should I hold them both down together? Woman 1: No, just push the star and then the 6. Man 1: So mute it now? Woman 1: yes, please mute your phone now. Woman 2: it's still not working! Man 1: you're pushing the star thing and the 6? Woman 2: yes. It's not working. Man 1: it worked for me. I muted it and then I unmuted it. Woman 2: What does mute mean, anyway? I'm not making that up. I don't know what the heck she expected it to do, but she was apparently muting and unmuting her phone over and over and insisting it wasn't working, because she couldn't tell that there was a difference. Later in the call, another woman asked if she would have to get her own computer because she didn't have one and hadn't ever used one and she was at her daughter's house who had set the whole thing up for her. One woman said, and I still haven't figured this out "I have to have dial up connection, you know, because of the Amish out here." Can anyone explain that to me? So, anyway, with vacation, new job training, my birthday party and my actual birthday (today, BTW), blogging had sort of slipped down my list. But I'm back, baby. For now, anyway.