Becky Says...

March 2002

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March 13

This was the day I was going to write about spring's upcoming arrival, and how much that pleases me. But that's on the shelf for another time. Today something happened that needs to be told.

Understand I'm telling this not to pat myself on the back. Yes, I did something I'm proud of myself for doing, and something I'm glad to have done. I'm telling it because someone else may be faced with the same decision, and I want to encourage that someone else to do what I did: take action.

This morning, when I was checking the statistics for this site, I noticed a newcomer among the visitors. The visitor had come from a company's server rather than a larger ISP. Thanks in large part to the Lenten webring (details below), there have been a lot of new readers over the past week or so. But not all visitors show up from there, so I was curious as to how this reader arrived. It's my site, after all; I'm allowed to wonder about such things.

When I looked, I saw that the reader had used MSN for a search. The search was for "suicide is not a selfish act," but the searcher did not use the quotation marks. The person got to this entry of mine, written nearly a year and a half ago, on the topic of suicide.

After not a whole lot of thought, I decided to get in touch with whoever answered e-mail at the company. I wrote, acknowledging that I might well be overreacting, but told what had been searched for. I said I would much rather look silly than risk allowing a potential suicide to go forward. The way the search was phrased bothered me. It could have been someone looking for some weird sort of permission.

Apparently the vice-president of the company didn't think it was silly. I got e-mail this afternoon thanking me, and letting me know my note had been passed on to the head of their human resources department. The identity of the searcher was being looked into, and if it was determined that help was needed, it would be made available.

I am glad I did something, even if what happens next is that someone gets embarrassed for helping with a homework assignment on work time.

Please, if you are faced with a decision like the one I had this morning, take the risk of looking foolish. Life is too precious to do otherwise.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Beth has started a ring of journallers who plan to update daily for the rest of Lent. The ring is called "Saving Kymm's Soul," in honor of Kymm's pledge to give up reading journals for Lent. She'll need a handy list of archives to search as she celebrates Easter, and we thought we'd help her out. The list of ring members is here.

Text � copyright 2000-2002 Becky