People I trusted lost my identity and it’s in the hands of person’s unknown or a spy.
It all began about five months ago when I applied for a Canadian passport.
After only three attempts and four months, Canada issued me a passport but — well, you can see what happened by the following e-mail:
Good Afternoon Mr. Summers,
To further our conversation of May 23, 2008 at 2:19pm. As discussed, recently you received your new passport and in error instead of your birth certificate and drivers license, you received the citizenship card and cancelled passport belonging to a Mr. X.
We are in the process of tracking your documents in order to return them to you. Can you please return Mr. X’s documents to us, along with the original receipt for the courier service and we will reimburse you for the costs.
Passport Canada Attn: Person 000
(I have used Person 000 to shield the sender of the above letter. Mr. X will be explained later.)
I replied:
Person 000 IPS Cell B 22, rue de Varennes Gatineau, QC Canada J8T 8R1 Gouvernement du Canada | Government of Canada Affaires étrangères Canada | Foreign Affairs Canada
May 26, 2008
Good Morning Person 000,
Thank you for your speedy response. I realize that you have many things to do that are far more important than my petty concerns and the mix-up of the documents was not your fault. No apologizes necessary.
I have the specific documents you asked for and will send them to you tomorrow. I’m in Los Angeles and most federal services are closed because of Memorial Day, otherwise I could mail the documents this very day.
The loss of my driver’s license and birth certificate is a trifle inconvenient but both are easily replaceable. So there is no long or short term harm done.
With luck I will get them back and if they can’t be found they can certainly be replaced. And it was no doubt my fault for sending originals. If so I apologize.
You and I joked about my time in a pyramid and thank you for taking it in the spirit of humor that it was intended. Someone who did not have your excellent sense of humor might have thought I was a nut case and for “the good of the nation” placed me on some kind of watch list.
That would have upset Mrs. Summers.
She has explained to me how much power rests in the hands of Foreign Affairs and cautioned me not to make jokes.
Mrs. Summers has repeated this for most of the weekend.
Still, it might amuse you to read about my time in a pyramid. If so, here: Paramids
You have my assurance that I will send Mr. X’s canceled passport and citizenship card to you tomorrow.
Is there a particular courier service you would like me to use?
Regards,
jaron summers
Within seconds I received the following:
Good Afternoon Mr. Summers,
You can assure your wife we do have a sense of humour. As for which courier service, whichever is most convenient for you. Please remember to include the original courier receipt for reimbursement.
Thank you again and have a great day.
Regards, Person 000
Then all hell broke loose in Foreign Affairs.
The director was fired that night after his girlfriend, a former wife of a Hell’s Angel, accused the director of leaving certain classified government documents at her place.
This resulted in my having to send the following letter to Person 000.
Person 000 Gouvernement du Canada | Government of Canada Affaires étrangères Canada | Foreign Affairs Canada
May 27, 2008
Good Afternoon Person 000,
As you know I said I would send X’s documents to you today by courier. I had used X to shield his true ID. I also identified him as “The Man in Cairo” in some of my earlier communiqués.
It appears he was born in Egypt from his papers that you sent me in error. Those papers suggested to me X might have been a spy.
As you also know Mrs. Summers has been out of her mind with worry, thinking that I am taking this business of our lost documents too lightly.
She became unhinged during the long weekend worrying about my current driver’s license and birth certificate which someone in your department sent to The Man from Cairo.
At least that’s what it looks like. I certainly got his ID, so we assume he got mine.
I felt there was nothing to worry about, although Mrs. Summers fretted that your people had given this chap a total ID package on yours truly.
Worse, in the middle of all of this Mrs. Summers’ valium ran out and she became difficult to deal with, thinking perhaps The Man from Cairo might clean out our bank accounts, destroy our mortgages and do whatever people do when they steal one’s identity.
In this case he did not steal our identity. Someone in your department gave it to him.
Not you, certainly, and for the record we hold you totally innocent.
I made several jokes about it but Mrs. Summers was not in a joking mode. She insists my ID in the wrong hands could decimate us.
I spent hours on the phone to banks, credit card companies and financial institutions alerting them that someone unknown to me is in possession of a current credit driver’s license and my original birth certificate with my name on them.
I reassured Mrs. Summers that Foreign Affairs runs a tight ship and things would be straightened out.
She was not buying it.
Mrs. Summers said that the Canadian government had in fact taken my identity and given it to a stranger. She asked, that since someone else is now me, who am I?
I worried that Mrs. Summers might need additional shock treatments. But I was able to stabilize her, more or less with whiskey and chocolate.
Hardly had I calmed down my dear wife when word reached us of the awful news of the resignation of the minister himself. Linked to a hot babe tied into the Hell’s Angels.
What in the world is going on, Person 000?
Now fanning Mrs. Summers’ growing fears is the developing story in the media that the Foreign Affairs minister has left documents in an unsecured situation.
Could those be our documents?
If so, the world has turned upside down for us.
Anyway, I said to Mrs. Summers that it was all a misunderstanding and I tried to slip out of the door with The Man from Egypt’s documents to post them.
Mrs. Summers physically stopped me. (She is quite a bit stronger than I am. And when she senses our tiny nest egg is in danger Mrs. Summers displays a kind of violence bordering on character.)
Her contention is that since I joke about things and have been known to add a bit of exaggeration to a story to get a laugh, that no one would believe me if my identity were stolen and our life savings pilfered.
“I will hang onto the Egyptian man’s documents so we can prove what Foreign Affairs did to us,” she said.
I told Mrs. Summers she was being unreasonable and that you would write to us and guarantee that there is no way the Minister would have taken our documents and released them to the wrong people, especially any members of a renegade motorcycle club. (I think those chaps are tied into organized crime. I saw one of them run over a kitten one time. Awful.)
Please email your note to me so that I can put Mrs. Summers’ fears to rest and get her to give me back the Man from Cairo’s papers.
I will send them to you post haste.
In the meantime I will attempt to see if we can get a more powerful tranquilizer for Mrs. Summers. We’re running low on chocolate and the whiskey is long gone.
Regards,
jaron summers
Canadians can’t smile in their passports!
