Calgary, September 2026
There is an old musical called Singing in the Rain, and I was thinking about it when I was walking, not singing, in the rain while hiking in the foothills near Calgary. It really was raining, but I needed to get away from my computer. The last few days I have spent too much time staring at the screen.
The trail makes a nice loop, and after one hour of walking in the rain, I was pretty wet. Soaked would be a better description. As I was finishing my walk, I was surprised to see a man lying in the mud of the wet trail.
“What happened?” I asked as I came closer.
“I slipped on the rock and hurt my ankle.”
“Can you walk?”
“Not very well. It really hurts.”
Obviously, I couldn’t just leave him there, especially because I am a social worker and my job is to assist people. Therefore, I helped him to stand up and, while he was holding onto my shoulder, we got to the parking lot. But then there was another problem.
“I cannot drive,” he said. “My car is manual, and I cannot press the clutch.”
At that point I began to wonder how far my social worker responsibilities go. Perhaps they don’t include driving people to the hospital, but I had no choice. “OK, I will drive you to the hospital, and you will have to arrange the recovery of your car later.”
There was some dry cloth in my car that we could use to change, and during the drive he told me something about himself. His name was Mark, and this accident was yet another event in the string of disasters happening to him. Some time ago his wife left him, then he lost his job, his unemployment insurance was running out, and now this. “Maybe you should have left me there to die,” he said, only half joking.
“I hope that your luck will turn for the better,” I tried to cheer him up, and when we arrived at the emergency ward, I gave him my business card. “Let me know how you are doing,” I said. Unfortunately, this turned out to be a mistake.
I got his first e-mail about a month later, and he was thanking me for saving his life. “The doctor told me that besides the broken ankle I also had a severe case of pneumonia, and if I stayed in that rain much longer, I would probably die,” he wrote. I replied, saying I was glad to be able to help. His next e-mail was less optimistic. “My unemployment insurance ran out, I didn’t find another job, couldn’t pay the rent and was evicted from the apartment. Now I am staying in the temporary shelter for the homeless.”
There were a few more increasingly bitter e-mails, and the last one said: “You should have left me on that trail to die!”
This was a bit too much. Blaming me for saving his life didn’t show much gratitude.
If you dislike your life so much, you can find your own way of killing yourself, I wrote. This turned out to be my second mistake, because after two weeks I got the following:
My dear friend,
It is strange that you, as a social worker, recommend suicide. I suppose that if I send your email to your employer, it wouldn’t look good. But I wouldn’t do it. I am sure we can come to some mutually acceptable agreement.
Your friend Mark.
I found it strange that Mark, whose life I have saved, tried to blackmail me for it. But he didn’t think it through. As a social worker, I have access to the data of people who ask for assistance, and I got Mark’s full name and social insurance number from the hospital. Sure enough, he was on one of my lists, and it was a pleasure to write him the following reply:
Dear Mark,
You are right; I am a social worker, as you probably found out from my business card, and I have full access to your file requesting social assistance. In fact, I have your file right in front of me. I want you to know that if you send that e-mail to my supervisor, I will include your attempted blackmail into that file and will make sure you will never get a single dollar for social assistance.
Your friend Dave
To pre-empt any further complications, I went to my boss and told him everything what happened. We went through Mark’s file in detail and found out that at least one of his misfortunes was self-made. He lost his job because of attempted theft. Now there was attempted blackmail, but I didn’t put it into his file. With the permission of my supervisor, I only lowered the priority of his request from urgent to standard.
I thought that now the whole episode was over, but about a year later I got another e-mail from Mark. He complained that all his requests for social assistance have been postponed or rejected. “Can you please do something?” he asked.
“It’s too late now; you shouldn't have started this," I thought, but then I began to reflect on it. Mark certainly wasn't a model citizen. He had lost his job due to theft and had tried to blackmail me. Did he deserve social assistance? I didn't know, but it wasn't my place to decide. All I knew was that he desperately needed that support. So, I pulled up his application again and changed the priority back to urgent. Let others decide whether he gets the aid. However, now I’ll think twice before going for another walk in the rain.