Boy Swallows Quarter – Who is this stranger who saves the boy from choking on the quarter?
A father walks into a market followed by his ten-year-old son. The boy is spinning a 25 cent piece in the air and catching it between his teeth. As they walk through the market someone bumps into the boy at just the wrong moment and the coin goes straight into his mouth and lodges in his throat. He immediately starts choking and going blue in the face and Dad starts panicking, shouting and screaming for help.
A middle-aged, fairly unnoticeable man in a gray suit is sitting at a coffee bar in the market reading his newspaper and sipping a cup of coffee. At the sound of the of the commotion, he looks up, puts his coffee cup down on the saucer, neatly folds his newspaper and places it on the counter. He gets up from his seat and makes his unhurried way across the market.
Reaching the boy, the man carefully reaches around the boy’s stomach and squeezes forcefully. After a few seconds the boy convulses violently and coughs up the quarter, which the man catches in his free hand. Releasing the boy, the man hands the coin to the father and walks back to his seat in the coffee bar without saying a word.
As soon as he is sure that his son has suffered no lasting ill-effects, the father rushes over to the man and starts effusively thanking him saying: ‘I’ve never seen anybody do anything like that before.’ It was fantastic! ‘Are you a doctor?’
‘Oh, good heavens, no,’ the man replies, ‘I work for the Internal Revenue Service.’
