a failure to communicate

Winter                                                                     Moon of the Winter Solstice

How’s this for irony?  My Latin tutor, Greg, and I conduct our sessions on the phone.  Have done for three years now.  Yesterday I had read out a line from the Loeb translation of a sentence we were having trouble with and I waited.  Nothing.  That had happened before so I hung up and called him again.  His phone picked up.  I spoke.  Nothing.

Well, then, he called me on my cell phone.  The landline works better for an hour or so of tutoring, so we usually use it.  I answered.  I spoke.  Nothing.  We traded attempts back and forth until Greg sent me an e-mail.  Was my phone on mute?  No, I e-mailed him back.  Weird.

We continued for a while, then we decided to scrap the session and move into January.  He e-mailed me later and said that both his and Ana’s phone had had the same problem.  AT&T.

Anyhow this tickled my funny bone.  Trying to learn how to communicate with a long dead poet in his own language, two of us, speaking  a common language, couldn’t communicate because the technology prevented it.  When we switched to e-mail, on which we could communicate, we could not use it for continuing our communication focused on Ovid.