The Arrogant Emu

I have a brilliant idea that will make us all a million dollars. This will be a blockbuster romantic comedy. (Hang on, do romantic comedies bust blocks?) So there’s a pair of female best friends who love to gab on the phone to each other. They share all the comic and intimate details of their lives over the telephone. However, one of the women works in at a fairly sensitive job in a government defense agency. She’s pretty sure that those clicks she hears during their conversation means the line is tapped - but it’s all in the day’s work.

Meanwhile, the agent who is listening in their phone conversations becomes increasingly captivated by the friend. She’s smart, she’s funny, she shows great wisdom in dealing with the various personal crises of herself and her friend. The agent becomes more and more attracted to her. Finally he decides to seek her out in real life and ask her out.

At first everything goes amazingly well. After all, he already knows everything about what she likes and doesn’t like. She thinks she’s never been with a guy who’s understood her so well - until one night he accidentally lets something slip, something that he couldn’t possibly have known unless he was listening in her conversations with her friend. Acrimonious breakup, tears and furniture-flinging. It’s all over!

Or is it? See, unbeknownst even to the government chick, the one being tapped was not herself on account of her sensitive job, but her friend, because her friend attends a mosque also attended by someone who’s under suspicion of terrorism. Now this friend is gentle and open-hearted and in in general the last person who would ever be suspected of any such activity but, once back in the office, the agent discovers that she is in a lot of trouble, erroneously implicated in some kind of plot and scheduled for arrest.

He sacrifices his job to save her (”She couldn’t have been at the Bright Street meeting on the 20th because… she was with me!”). She reads about his fall from grace in the papers, and realizes that, as he was willing to lose his career for a woman whom he thought hated and despised him. So they get back together. And everything ends happily.