The Foreign Embassy

Moses is probably in his early 70's, a small, wizened Jewish man with big glasses and a grin that stretches across his face.

He can't hear at all, he says. His hearing just upped and stopped working. Well, he clarifies, when he was born, he couldn't hear a lick, couldn't speak, either, but eventually it kicked in. Now, after all this time, it's cut out again. Moses is getting a CAT scan tomorrow to see if his brain's ok, then he'll probably get an implant so he can hear again. But for now, I'm gonna have to talk pretty loud.

That's fine, I tell him. I can talk pretty loud.

Moses, it turns out, is a civil engineer who's specialized in traffic engineering design for over forty years. He's won awards from the city, state, and country for his work. He's particularly proud of an intersection on North Lake that he tells me I should check out. And as I'm helping him with his computer, he tells me gleefully of the time, when he was working in the signal department of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation back in the 1970's, that he got a call from a little old lady asking him to please extend the duration of a nearby traffic signal so that she'd have more time to cross the street. After telling her that extending the signal would warp traffic patterns all across the city, he says to her, "C'mon, lady! I'm not God! I'm just Moses!"

Moses laughs like it just happens yesterday and pounds me happily on the shoulder, and I laugh right along with him. When I tell him that I'm a civil engineer as well, or at least I graduated as one, he asks me what the hell I'm doing helping him with iPhoto, then tells me to give him a call if I decide to get back into engineering. "Or go work for L.A.D.O.T.," he says, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together and giving me a wink. I dutifully take his email address and give him my card, and he shakes my hand and goes off on his way, nearly deaf and facing possible brain surgery, but as happy as anyone could hope to be because we've figured out his problem with iPhoto.

Fixing people's problems all day can be a trying job at times, and I occasionally need a reminder that everyone, until they prove otherwise, is worthy of courtesy and respect. Which is why I'm always happy for someone like Moses to come along.