bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2015), p. 40
Way back in the 1970s the Department’s Ottawa duty officer normally stayed at home and fielded calls forwarded by the Commissionaires at Fort Pearson. It was my great pleasure to have been volunteered as duty officer for the August bank holiday long weekend in about 1977.
My trials began Saturday morning when I received a call from a junior officer at the Hungarian Embassy. He explained that he had issued visas for travel to Hungary to an academic and a Member of Parliament during the week and had sent their passports out by courier on Friday. However, he had just received a call from the academic (who was to attend a conference starting in Budapest on Monday morning) to say that he had received by mistake the Member of Parliament’s passport and visa. Obviously, my new Hungarian friend explained, his secretary had put the wrong passports in the wrong envelopes. He needed to get the academic’s passport back from the Member of Parliament’s box in the parliamentary mailroom.
As we External types always try to be helpful, I undertook to call security in the Centre Block and see what could be done. I received a frosty response from a security guard, who had apparently been harassed by the pest from Budapest. He explained to me that there was nothing he could do as the person who had the key to the mailroom had gone to her cottage for the long weekend, and had no telephone there.
I called the Hungarian Embassy and explained that nothing could be done until Tuesday morning. He wouldn’t take no for the answer though, and called me back several times during the day. On the last call, he suggested that he and I could go to parliament and “enter the male room by use of force” to retrieve the passport! Somewhat stunned by the proposal, I let the conversation lapse for a moment – which he may have taken for weakness or a softening in my position, because he hastened to add that if the roles were reversed, he would do this for me in Budapest.
For a moment, I wondered what the Ottawa Citizen would make out of report that a diplomat from a Communist state and an officer of the Department of External Affairs were caught breaking down the door of the parliamentary mailroom with a crowbar. With this in mind, I reiterated that he would have to wait until Tuesday, when he could speak to the Member of Parliament’s office. I heard no more from him and often wondered if he had been sent to a Hungarian equivalent of the gulag for his transgression.
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Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2015), p. 40. Read the rest of this issue →
