When my parents called me at 10 in the evening, I knew something was wrong.
At first, my mind started drifting into a land of disadvantage thoughts and possibilities.
When I picked up the iphone, I braced myself for whatever exhausting news I was about to hear. Both of my parents were on the receiving end rambling on and on about their thermostat. I couldn’t quite understand what either of them were saying because they were talking over each other in a panic, finally, I told them to stop speaking so hastily and tell me in straight-forward terms what was happening, and my mom said that their thermostat wasn’t laboring. They were about to go to bed and when she went to lower the temperature, nothing happened. They didn’t feel their heating system was laboring at all and they were anxious they were going to freeze at night. In an attempt to keep them calm, I had my dad update the batteries to see if that was the issue; He had no idea where the batteries even went and he was convinced that their thermostat didn’t take batteries at all. After spending 5 minutes reassuring him that their thermostat did in fact take batteries, he finally found out how to update them. Thankfully, they had the right batteries on hand. Once they updated them, their thermostat lit up again. I walked them through how to get their heating system back up and running and they were relieved. I’m just relieved that nothing was seriously wrong and it was only a technical difficulty.