I’m entertaining friends in the rumpus room when I hear mum’s call.

“Joan!”

“What, mum?”

Dad rushes down the stairs, holding the phone before him. “It’s Jason,” he says grimly. “He says it’s an emergency.”

I put the phone to my ear.

“Joan!” comes Jason’s frantic voice. “You need to do some emergency programming!”

“Huh?!”

“There’s a problem in Western Australia. Go up to my room and turn on my laptop.”

Confused, I run upstairs.

“What’s going on, Jason?”

“Is the laptop on? You need to open up muvision. It’s a black and yellow icon. Now find the file called ‘main.c’. Go up to the top and scroll down until you reach the function called ‘main’.”

“Function?” I reach back into my hazy past and recall ‘Engineering Programming’ (ie. Java for Dummies).

“Find the ‘while’ loop… It’ll have the word ‘while’ in it.”

“Jason, I have a bunch of computer scientists, mathematicians and electrical engineers downstairs. Do you want to talk to them?”

“No, Joan. You can do it.” He believes in me.

“There’s a line with 2000 or 20000 in it. Do you see it?”

“Yes.”

“Read it to me, every character.”

I hear the intense concentration of silence as I read each letter, square bracket and space. After my litany, he instructs me to make changes.

“Now compile it, Joan.”

“Compile,” I murmur. I look for the ‘compile’ button.

“It’s in the top left. It looks like a pile of paper.”

I click it cautiously. Suddenly, a stream of sentences fills the window at the bottom of the screen. Thankfully, there are none of these “bugs” of which Jason tells me. Jason then leads me through finding the file on the hard disk, renaming it, then compressing it.

As I do this, I think of my guests downstairs, who are probably wondering where their host has disappeared to.

“Now put it on a USB disk and email it from the main computer.”

I fumble with my USB disk (which I normally use to transfer Microsoft Word files), then finally email it to Western Australia.

“Thanks, Joan. I hope that works. Bye.” The dial tone tells me it is over.