GRANDMA FRIDAY
First call: March 1998. Most recent: last Friday.

She bought her first computer at 79 so she could write to her granddaughter, whose husband is in the Navy. Her first call came in at 11:30 on a Friday night and lasted three hours. She didn't know what double-clicking was, so we practiced on Solitaire until she could move a card without dropping it. Around 2 a.m. her first e-mail went out. Her granddaughter wrote back the next morning.

She called the next Friday to make sure it still worked. And the next. It's been a year and a half. Her e-mail almost never has a problem anymore. She calls anyway, at 11:30, every Friday, so one of us can send her a test message and she can say goodnight. Every December the night shift gets a card addressed to "The Nice Young Men and Sabrina." If you're reading this, ma'am: I'm eating right. Mostly.

THE BUILDER
Fall 1996, a week of nights

A fifteen-year-old built his first computer out of parts from a computer show and couldn't get the modem to talk to it. He called every night for a week. Back then you set the COM port and the IRQ with little jumpers on the card, and his were set to fight with his mouse. We went through it one jumper at a time. On the seventh night it dialed in, and he yelled so loud his mother picked up the extension to see what happened. He's a freshman at Ohio State now, in engineering. He still e-mails me when he builds a new one.

THE FRUITCAKE LADY
December 1997 and every December since

The week her husband moved into a nursing home, a woman down near Chillicothe called because she wanted to be able to e-mail her kids, who are spread out over four states. She was having the worst month of her life and she apologized to me for taking up my time. We got her going. Every December since, a homemade fruitcake comes to the office addressed to "The Night Shift." I know fruitcake has a reputation. This one doesn't deserve it. It lasts us to February.

THE PROOFREADER
Spring 1998

A retired proofreader who read every word on every screen out loud before he'd click anything, including the buttons. "There's a box. It says OK. It also says Cancel." It took an hour to set up his e-mail and I didn't mind at all, because halfway through he stopped and said, "Your instructions on page two spell 'receive' wrong." They did. Nobody had noticed in two years. It's fixed now. I asked if we could hire him. He said he was retired for a reason.

THE NIGHT THE LIGHTS WENT OUT
Summer 1998

A thunderstorm knocked out the power to our building around one in the morning. The phones and the modems are on big backup batteries, so the service never went down, but the lights did. Sabrina and I took calls for an hour and forty minutes by flashlight, reading the screens off a laptop. Not one caller knew. One man did ask why I sounded like I was in a cave. I told him I was. It was close enough.

THE PROPOSAL
The night before Valentine's Day, 1999

A man called at 2:30 in the morning. His girlfriend lived in Oregon, he had written her a proposal of marriage, and he wanted it to arrive at exactly midnight her time, which was 3 a.m. ours. He wanted to know if e-mail could be late. I said it usually isn't, but I'd stay on the line. We sent it at 2:59 and talked about the Buckeyes for twenty minutes while he waited. At 3:22 he called back. She said yes. I still have no idea what his name is. Congratulations, sir.

MELISSA
Friday, March 26, 1999

The longest night I've worked. The Melissa virus came as a Word document attached to e-mail, and when somebody opened it, it sent itself to fifty people in their address book. All night long we got calls from people whose computers had sent mail they never wrote, to their bosses and their pastors and their mothers, and they were mortified. We took them through it one at a time. I said "It's not your fault" probably a hundred times that night, and I meant it every time. The lesson, if you want one: don't open an attachment you weren't expecting, even from a friend.

THE MAN WITH THE FORWARDS
This August

A man called at four in the morning to ask if there was any setting that would stop his mother's forwards. She sends him about fifteen a day. I told him there were ways to filter mail into a folder, and I showed him. Then I told him the best fix I knew wasn't technical: call your mother and tell her you love the jokes but not the warnings. He called back a week later on my shift. He'd called her. She sends him three a day now, all jokes, and they're talking more than they have in years.

HONORABLE MENTION: EVERYBODY WHO'S ASKED ABOUT Y2K
Ongoing

I stopped counting at two hundred. Will my modem work on January 1? Yes. Your modem doesn't know what year it is. Your computer might, and you can check that with the company that made it. I'm working the night of December 31, so if anything happens, call me. I'll be here with a pot of coffee and, probably, Grandma Friday.