The Best Business Phone Call I've Ever Had

Got my new Visa card in the mail today, the old one is expiring shortly, so tonight I called to activate the new one. Went through the usual entering of numbers and so on, and then talked to a representative. She asked me how the weather was in Brooklyn and I told her it was a beautiful early fall night. I asked where she was and she said, at a call center in Idaho, but she told me she used to live in Queens. I asked where, and she said, in Howard Beach, near the big Waldbaum's on Cross Bay Boulevard. I cracked up laughing and told her, back in the seventies I dated a girl (my ex Suzanne) whose sister worked in that Waldbaums! New York really is a small town.

She told me she was teaching school in Far Rockaway in the nineties, and that she was here on September 11th. We traded stories about the day. She told me that after that day she had to move back to Idaho, to be near her family, her daughter, her four grandchildren. I told her to call them when she got off duty and tell them she loves them, 'cos you never know when it will be the last chance you have to say it. Think about it, on the morning of 9/11 almost three thousand people left their homes expecting to return that evening.... She told me that she was going off duty and I'd been her last call of the evening, and we thanked each other for such a pleasant twenty-odd minutes. Totally made my evening!