March 2025
Dear friends of SpringDale and friends I have yet to meet,
Some of what I get to do each day is to help to solve problems, and yesterday I was able to solve some problems for SpringDale. We had been experiencing problems with our phones for the last few days. This resulted in us having to turn the phones off and on daily to get them to rest and behave.
Having reported the problem to our internet provider via email after waiting on hold for a long wait, didn’t give us any results, so, yesterday I rang and asked for a technician to call us back. Five hours later we received the call and it was a very competent technician – I loved talking to him.
My recollection of what he said is: Apparently, when Voice over internet Protocol (VOIP) addresses were being set up worldwide, a number of billion were created. This was before fridges, washing machines, cars etc needed to be able to dial in. All of a sudden there weren’t sufficient, and a few weeks ago a new protocol was adopted iPv6 giving us trillions of addresses. The technician talked me through enabling the VOIP phones at SpringDale to be able to use iPv6.
I asked the technician re the breadth of this problem and he said it could be a problem for anyone with a VOIP phone depending upon how their provider is handling it. I said I help produce a monthly magazine and people may be interested. He said it was only a problem while people still had a home phone and this was more for our aging population. I assured him I wanted to keep my home phone as I was wanting to age gracefully and we wanted to keep our phones at SpringDale too.
Mission two for yesterday was to solve a 5-year-old problem. When we started to inherit material in 2020, a community member decided that she would use some of the prettiest material to make kits and she would run Kalbarri Log Bag making classes using the kits. COVID dragged on and the kits sat here without instructions and the community member moved away. We then had a boxful of kits. Yesterday a lady picked up a kit and wanted to buy it – she asked about the instructions and I had to tell her the story.
This time the lady gave me her name and number and she said she would love to buy the kit if we had instructions, she had actually returned to do that, having seen the kit a while ago. I committed to contacting her once I had instructions. I found a post of Facebook, I tracked down the owner of the post – it was a quilting shop. I contacted the shop and the owner emailed the instructions. I contacted the lady and she is coming to pick up the kit today.
Actually completing to challenges makes me feel ready to face what is next. Who knows what today will hold. Often we spend time helping people with their challenges, but it was great to get something off our list too.
Hoping 2025 is treating you well and hoping to see you at SpringDale soon.
Yours kindly,
Anne Brackley OAM
Chief Enthusiasm Officer & Coordinator
SpringDale Neighbourhood Centre Inc.
