Move over, Ace Ventura… there’s a new pet detective in town!
Videos by InspireMore
Like many dads, Steph Veerman’s father wasn’t too thrilled when she decided to get a pet hamster. He reluctantly vowed to look after Chester when she went back to college, never expecting that in her absence he’d fall in love with the little guy himself.
One day, Chester went missing, and Steph’s dad kind of went off the deep end. In a panic, he sent his daughter a text message asking her to call him immediately.
“It’s an emergency,” his text promised.
Even though she was obviously concerned about Chester too, Steph tried to reassure him that “it’s just a hamster.” Her father wouldn’t hear it. Instead, he blamed himself for losing Chester, vowing to not give up looking, even if it meant missing work as an attorney the next day.
When Steph shared this sweet text exchange with her friends on Twitter, the internet fell in love with her earnest father in a very big way. Soon, people were invested in the story and begging for updates.
By mid-afternoon, her father had stopped searching blindly and started strategizing on the pet’s whereabouts. He set up a little hamster tracking station complete with a ring of flour, so if the hamster walked through it, he’d leave little footprints behind.
“So I know he’s still alive,” her dad informed Steph.
Throughout the afternoon, Steph received increasingly worried texts from her father about the missing hamster.
“This is my biggest screw up ever,” he wrote. “I will make this right.”
No matter what Steph said to calm him, he refused to stop blaming himself. Finally, after hours of fretting, the long rodent-hunt came to a rather anticlimactic conclusion.
Was he in his cage the whole time? Or did he go in there when her dad wasn’t looking? How did he avoid stepping in the flour? Either way, bad Chester. Bad!
It must have taken hours for Steph’s poor father to bring his blood pressure down to a normal level. After informing Steph that Chester was already trying to get out of his cage again, she suggested he arrest the animal.
“This is the most stressful day in my life since I took the bar exam,” he told her before signing off for the night.
Steph shared the story on Twitter as an example of how “pure” her father is, and we have to agree. It takes a very sweet heart to drop everything to search for a lost hamster. Especially a hamster that seems determined to escape his cushy life!
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