In which I got a phone call from a 13 digit number

My phone informed me that it was full yesterday and I began to empty out a whole bunch of old text messages, the majority of which were ones that said that I had voicemail messages waiting for me. I ran into one that was from an unusually long number, 13 digits. It took me a while to figure out who it was before I realized that it was a Chinese number.

Devon.

Purely by coincidence he phoned me later that evening, which I wasn't expecting because long distance between China and Canada must be expensive.

He was calling because there was an earthquake in Taiwan a little while ago which broke some of the fibre optic cables under the ocean between China and the US and has slowed down considerably the access to internet in the little town where he is staying.

Meanwhile, somehow or other he managed to hurt his ankle and wound up in hospital for it. He won't say how that happened, but knowing him, it could be anything, really. What's unfortunate for him is that at this moment, he is the tallest person in China, which, aside from making him strangely attractive to gay men, means that his crutches are a good four inches too short. That added to the fact that he has to walk to work every morning means that it isn't exactly healing all that fast.

His roommates got a dog a while ago but no one has really bothered to take care of it. Because of that it's a pretty sad dog and he's decided that it has to go, but that means a difficult choice: eat it or send it to Canada. One is cheap and final, though he'd still have to live with the roommates afterward and the other is expensive and arguably harder on the dog, because it would spend at least a month in quarantine once it was here and be surrounded by lots of unfamiliar people for months.

I wonder at the wisdom of getting any kind of pet in the first place, especially when none of them intend to stay in China for more than a year. The person he went there with was sent there so she would "grow up" and obviously she hasn't.

Sometimes I worry about people.