I hate Monday mornings. I wake up terribly early knowing that by noon, I'll have to think about going to sleep so that I can wake up with enough energy to do a ball-busting midnight shift. If I have enough energy, I might go to the gym for a light workout, come home and do myself up some scrambled eggs Gordon Ramsay style.
However one Monday morning a few weeks ago I had very little energy and just decided to goof off on my laptop and checkout what wasn't happening on Facebook. I was probably about ten second away from closing the window when all of a sudden my friend Connie messaged me. And I had a feeling that it was important because she addressed me by my first name. In my experience, people only do that if the situation is pretty important.
So she gave me an 800 phone number to call and confirm if she had a flight for tomorrow morning. It was then that she told me that she was messaging me from a hospital in Muskat, Oman. For those of you who didn't watch Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego as a kid, that's in the Middle East. Connie spent her Christmas holidays there and was a teacher there a few years ago.
Seems that while she was down she caught some jihad-virus that was going around or something, was stuck in the hospital and thus, missed her flight the previous day but now couldn't tell if she was rescheduled for a flight tomorrow or not.
So there I am, about six-thirty in the morning, trying to figure out how to help my friend escape the Middle East within the next 24 hours. I called the airline and trying to get all the info I can, relaying it back through Facebook and then relaying any concerns Connie may have back to the airline. Needless to say I was saying, "Could you hold on a minute" quite a few times during these phone calls.
After about twenty minutes of dealing with people with bad accents, I was finally able to get the times for her flights. She would leave Muskat, then fly into Kuwait, then off the Dulles International Airport and then to Detroit with a short drive back into Ontario.
Just before I got off the line, the attendant I was dealing with asked me if he wanted to upgrade Connie's seat to give her more legroom for only the small fee of $150 USD.
I relayed this to Connie and based off the negativity of her response, I told the airline that she would pass on the generous (I made sure they could hear the sarcasm) offer.
Connie did manage to make it home and that day, I got a cheque from the government of Canada (Most likely word of me rescuing a fellow countryman spread quickly) and my Batman shirt arrived in the mail.
So yeah, I'm a hero. Saved a friend from captivity in a Middle Eastern hospital which was boasting about how their doctors washed their hands semi-daily and had been Jew free for 34 days. And I did this less than an hour after waking up.
The moral of the story: Schweitzer-Man is awesome
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