It's only a minor problem -- but I'm not sure I can solve it

My father is fond of saying that some problems have no solutions. Right now I’m facing one of them. It’s not a really big problem. It’s just a challenge that I don’t think can be successfully met. And yet to even say those words sounds so somehow un-American. Doesn’t everything from my education to my country of birth to my religion inform me that challenges exist to be met? Am I really ready to say there are cases when simply giving up is the right thing to do?

To make a long story short, last spring our school’s parent volunteer association decided that rather than having Walk-to-School Day be a twice-a-year event, we should form a Walk-to-School Committee whose mission would be “to make walking or biking to school a safe and regular habit.” In other words, something that happens all the time, not just on two designated days that include raffle prizes and lots of ceremony. And they asked me to chair this committee.

I pulled off a bang-up launch. On October 5, despite impending rain, nearly 200 kids in Carlisle’s elementary and middle school grades walked or biked to school. The grades with the highest and second-highest rate of participation won cool prizes. Fourteen volunteers staffed the crosswalks to ensure safe passage.

But the event’s triumphs, ironically enough, may have turned out to also be its downfall. As successful as it was deemed to be, I’m now stuck with the suspicion that it takes three months of planning, $50 worth of prizes and fourteen volunteers to make it possible for kids to walk to school.

My committee wants to make Walk-to-School Day a weekly event. And we can do it without the prizes and heraldry. It’s the fourteen volunteers that I can’t seem to get past. Carlisle simply isn’t a walking town. Our town doesn’t have traffic lights: walkers are strictly at the mercy of the judgment of drivers. The new footpath system is wonderful as far as making it possible to walk somewhere other than in the roadway on the main streets, but the cars that pass through the center aren’t expecting to stop for crossing foot traffic. The side streets have neither sidewalks nor footpaths, and many of them don’t even have adequate shoulders, at least adequate enough to shelter pedestrians during rush hour.

I put out an appeal for adult volunteers to help with a weekly Walk-to-School plan, but the response was scanty, and I can’t say I blame anyone. Most parents of school-aged children I know are already booked to the hilt with volunteer activities, whether or not they also hold down full-time jobs that might prevent them from being available at the walk-to-school hour. Some of the town’s older residents who do not have young children in the schools provided a great deal of help at our Walk-to-School launch, but I can’t blame them either for not wanting to make this a weekly commitment.

So I’m stuck with how to admit that I might not be able to do this. It would be a much better story – and a much more traditional one – if I rose up against the odds and showed that a safe walk-to-school program could be done. If the naysayers were someone other than me, over whom I could triumph in the face of their skepticism. The problem is the task is mine – and I’m also the one most skeptical.

It puts me in a problematic position. I’m not much of a hero if I say “Sorry, I tried to lead this effort but it’s not going to work.” That surely won’t put me in the annals of American mythology. After all, my friend Deborah faced down fifteen years of obstacles simply to get Carlisle’s footpath system installed. It doesn’t make me look very impressive if I can’t take the project the next step and ensure that they are used.

I haven’t given up yet, and at the same time, I see no evidence that I can make this work. In the end, I may have to be the anti-hero: the one who admits that sometimes a plan just can’t be pulled off. I don’t want that to be my role, and I’m not willing to give up yet. But it may be that Dad is right: some problems do not have solutions. As un-American as that may sound, it just may be true.

Oh, the empowerment: serving as my own helpdesk

Being able to ask for help when you need it is a vital life skill in itself, but being able to manage on your own sometimes feels great too, as I discovered this week.

I am not a technical person. I rely on my husband to set up and maintain my computer system, my printer, my e-mail. When there’s a problem, I plead for help, but sometimes I’m like the shoemaker’s child who goes barefoot. Sometimes my husband is just too busy with the two factions whose tech support problems receive higher priority than mine – his clients and my parents – to help me in a timely fashion.

As this week began, I had reached the end of my rope with two ongoing technical problems: one with my iPod Nano and one with my Microsoft Outlook. Refreshed after a nearly work-free weekend, I launched into the new week resolved to solve these two glitches.

I attacked the iPod issue first. The problem was that I like to listen to podcasts while running. Every week I download about a dozen new podcasts from NPR, the New York Times, and the New Yorker. But I couldn’t get them to play sequentially. I’d set one podcast to play as I started my run, and when that one ended, a new one wouldn’t start without me manually selecting and clicking on it. The reason selecting and clicking was undesirable was that any buttons I press on my iPod while I’m running will interfere with the function of my NikePlus, which measures my distance, mileage and speed.

Yes, it’s complicated, arcane and frivolous as complaints go, but runners get set in their ways, and I want both: a complete mileage readout and the ability to listen to more than one podcast if the first one happened to end while I was still out running. I knew the answer was to put the podcasts in a playlist, and I’d gotten that far, but the playlist wouldn’t copy from my iTunes library into my iPod.

I tried to think outside the box. (Thinking outside the box is always preferable to being on hold with tech support.) Was I doing something wrong in making my playlist, or was the problem putting podcasts on a playlist? As a control, I realized, I had to try to make a playlist without podcasts, a conventional playlist of music.

I don’t keep any music at all on my iPod; I use it only for podcasts, but my daughter had downloaded all her favorite American Idol tunes onto my computer, so I randomly chose three songs to put in my playlist and synched. It worked – the playlist copied. Then I tried adding podcasts into the playlist and synched. Again, success. I took the three songs out and left the podcasts in. Synched. Nothing. The playlist was gone from my iPod. I put one song back in with the six podcasta and synched. It returned, a fully functioning playlist.

So – there was my answer. It takes a village to raise a child; it takes a song to make a playlist. I don’t know why, but with as little as one song, a playlist can include any number of podcasts; with no songs, a playlist won’t work. So all I had to do was be willing to include one American Idol tune in my cerebral mix, which is why my playlist now comprises Terry Gross interviewing an economist from the Bush administration, Susan Orlean discussing her latest New Yorker article, the podcast of the New York Times book review and Adam Lambert covering Steppenwolf’s Born to be Wild. The combination made for a seamless half-hour of running this afternoon. I was thrilled with my proactivity in finally taking the time to think through the problem, figure out a solution, and test the results.

Which left the second problem I was determined to solve: my Microsoft Outlook. For some reason, for the past week I’ve been able to receive mail through Outlook but not send it. On the one hand, this seemed symbolic: it was like a cosmic message that I needed to listen more and talk less. But there were some messages I really did need to send, and they kept getting stuck in my outbox. If I wanted to send e-mails, I had to go through the website version of my email each time, which within the incredibly cosseted world of e-mail seemed like a big extra hassle, though I kept reminding myself that fifteen years ago, when I was still using a dial-up connection that generally reached a busy signal, it wouldn’t have seemed so difficult.

For the first two days of the week, I exchanged emails with our domain provider. Their tech support staff was helpful, but in the end they couldn’t solve it; they said it was a problem on our internet service provider’s end. I took it up this morning with our ISP. I started with their website: found the internet section, found the e-mail section, and to my surprise, found myself staring at a link that stated my problem exactly: can’t send mail through Outlook. I clicked and discovered a whole page of text dedicated to my problem. It turned out this wasn’t mysterious at all: my ISP knew it was happening and knew why it was happening. More important, they knew how to fix it – and how to explain the fix to someone as nontechnical as me. One step at a time, I followed the directions, repaired my Outlook, and could once again send e-mail.

So with the week only halfway done, I had reached two goals, solved two frustrating problems, and done it myself, which hardly ever happens with technical concerns. I hadn’t done any significant writing or published any articles this week, but I’d gone to bat for myself as my own tech support, and I was psyched. Problem solved. Empowerment achieved. What a great feeling.