Things that Don't Fit in a Drawer #12: To Give or Not to Give Up

In the days of old, when He-Whom-I'm-Trailing & I first lived in Shanghai, before Skype & pre- weChat, in order to make an international call, we needed something called an IP card.

The IP Card gave you a super long string of numbers that you had to punched in to your phone in order to access an international line. Somewhere in the course of the sequence of numbers, you inevitably screwed up which meant you had to punch that whole incredibly long set of numbers, sometimes several times, before you finally got a [crackly] line thru to the States. It could drive you nuts. If you needed help in [so-called] English, the IP card gave a number for that too. That help number gave you two options: you could "press 1" to hear...umm... something not quite intelligible... Or, you could "press 2 to give up."

Which also became the code for "having a really bad china day."

 

So, yesterday, on the street, I tried to decipher the meaning of this t-shirt ... If it's advertising a help line, then, painfully, the phone number is one digit too long.

You might as well "press 2."

Which is the gallows humor way around to the real point of this post: to say how proud I am of two "Everyday Heroes" who are putting their time in on Not Giving Up On Yourself: my nephew, Tim Shmigel, who raised $41,000AUS to date for Lifeline, an Australian crisis support and suicide prevention organization, by walking 6000 kilometers from the bottom to the top of Australia (and then biking back down to Sydney!) and my brother, Peter Shmigel, who has just taken on the challenge of growing Lifeline's outreach by becoming its CEO. Amazing beings, both of them!

Tim's goal is to raise $60,000 so, if you've the inclination to help, here's the donation link: https://give.everydayhero.com/au/tim-56 Any size contribution is deeply appreciated!