A Burnaby senior is a little warmer this week after receiving a special gift thanks to the kindness of an E-Comm dispatcher.
When Janie Fumo, a call taker at E-Comm - the emergency communications centre for southwest B.C. - received a phone call from a Burnaby senior looking for the address of the nearest Canadian Tire, she never expected it would end with a spur of the moment fundraiser at E-Comm headquarters.
On Dec. 9, Fumo was answering calls on the non-emergency line when a 97-year-old woman called in. The woman was looking for the address of Canadian Tire so she could go buy a heater for her apartment in Burnaby. She had seen the heater in the store's flyer, but there wasn't a location close to her home.
"I had my partner look (the address) up and she said 'Oh, it's moved to Market Crossing and the other one is going to be in Vancouver, at Grandview and Renfrew,'" she recalled.
Fumo told the senior where the two locations were and the senior responded by asking her which bus she should take to get to the Vancouver location.
"She's asking how to get to the SkyTrain and once she gets off there what bus does she take," she said.
Fumo and her colleague Hadley Hart devised a plan to split the cost of a heater and take it to the woman, rather than have her travel across the city via transit. So Fumo went and asked her supervisor for permission to buy the heater and deliver it. Much to Fumo's surprise her supervisor suggested she ask the other staff at E-Comm if they too wanted to donate to the cause.
"So I did, and within an hour and a half we had enough money to buy her a really good heater and $60 leftover. It was so awesome," she said.
After the money was collected, another one of Fumo's colleagues offered to go and buy the heater on her lunch break. By this time, Fumo had reached out to the Burnaby RCMP who agreed to send over an officer to pick up the heater, deliver it to the Burnaby senior by the end of the day and donate another $40 to the cause.
"They delivered it and showed her how to use it, it was so cute," she said.
The next day, Fumo received a second phone call from the senior to thank her.
"She said, 'This morning, I had a blanket and a sweater on, and the minute I plugged it in, I took my sweater and blanket off,'" she said. "At the end of the day it wasn't about the heater, it wasn't about every body else."
