A while back I served as guarantor of my dear friend Shannon Henderson’s (pseudonym!) passport application, and they called me to verify details. In the morning. I don’t do mornings. This is, more or less, a transcript of the phone call.
[ring ring]
G: [coughs] Yeah? The fuck is it?
Official: Is this Graeme Koffman? I’m calling you from Passport Canada. We’re phoning with respect to your endorsement as guarantor of the passport application made by Sharon Henderson. No, sorry, that’s “Shannon”, with two “n”s.
G: What? You’re who now? [coughs]
Official: This is the Passport Canada – the Canadian Passport Office. We’re calling you with respect to –
G: What time is it?
Official: It’s 11 o’clock, sir.
G: Morning or night?
Official: It’s 11 in the morning, sir.
G: Oh…OK…shit…
Official: Now about Ms. Henderson; we need you to verify that –
G: Who?
Official: Shannon Hen –
G: Oh, yeah, Shannon, right. Nobody calls her that.
Official: I’m sorry?
G: Nobody calls her that, not after that thing on the El Al flight to Tel Aviv…
Official: I’m sorry?
G: …yeah, that was a real mess. Godawful mess. Reporters wouldn’t stop calling after that, so she’s unofficially Delores Frum these days. That’s probably what she wants on the passport, right?
Official: Er…
G: I told her when she got back – they held her for months, we were beginning to think she might not be coming home – anyway, “Delores”, I said, “you’re lucky we aren’t doing business with those black ops guys in Thailand these days, it could have been one of those ‘extraordinary rendition’ deals”. And she looked at me kind of confused, like, she didn’t see why, as if everybody tries to get on airplanes with two frickin’ hand grenades in their frickin’ carry-ons.
Official: I’m sorry, sir, are you alleging –
G: You’ll land your ass in Gitmo that way. That’s what I told her.
Official: Our background checks didn’t reveal –
G: Wait – who the fuck is this again?
Official: Passport Canada. You’re talking to an employee of the Federal Government sir, and you’re making some rather troubling assertions that I’m going to need you to explain.
G: Assertions? About what?
Official: About passport applicant Shannon Henderson. Now –
G: Do you guys care about the drugs? I mean, some of that stuff’ll be legal by the time Justin is through.
the needlefish 
Reminds me of the phone calls we used to have when you first moved to Toronto; [you know, the ones where we randomly sprinkled words like “down-look radar” “towed-array sonar” and “Fiber Optics Guided Multiple Purpose Missile”, randomly into the middle of sentences, just to get the NSA tapes rolling.]
Good times.
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Yeah! I’d call you up and start in with “Hey, Markie, how’s it going with the circular error probable on the new MIRV bus? You might want to add GPS to the inertial guidance, now that NAVSTAR is up and running – but don’t ditch the inertial, the latest laser ring gyros are pretty great, and they’re not susceptible to jamming!”
I wouldn’t do that today.
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