I was talking to an old friend yesterday. “You know, I never realized how many people I know until I started working this campaign,” I said.

“You’re really good at networking,” she said. It’s true; my friends call me the Queen of Network. I can usually find someone within three degrees of separation.

One major factor in a city like Philadelphia is that I went to a very large Catholic school and can find a classmate (or a friend of a classmate) almost anywhere. Plus, Philadelphia’s just that kind of town. (I was once arguing with a ticket agent in Florida about getting my guitar on the plane when she mentioned she was from Philadelphia, too. “Oh, really? Where did you go to school?” I said. “Bartram,” she said. Turns out she sat in homeroom with my next-door neighbor. She told me, “Don’t worry, I’m going to get additional packing for your guitar and I promise nothing will happen to it. Us Southwest Philly kids have to look out for each other!”)

Anyway, this morning I got a call from my best friend. She was trying to get home from Las Vegas and wound up in the Charlotte, North Carolina airport. (In case you didn’t know, a giant winter storm pretty much socked in the entire East Coast last night.)

“I spent the night on a Red Cross cot, and they turned the heat down. It was cold,” she said pitifully. “And you know how I can usually sleep through anything? Well, there was a gang of drunken assholes making noise. They were playing games with the public announcement system.”

She said she was hoping to get on the next flight to Philadelphia within a few hours.

An hour later, I got a call from another friend. “Are you around today? I’m flying into Philadelphia, maybe we can have lunch,” he said. He explained that his plane back to D.C. was detoured because of the storm, and he’d spent the night (you guessed it) on a Red Cross cot in the Charlotte airport.

“Susie, I met a bunch of people who went to my college, some Swedes and a gang of Marines,” he said. “It was so much fun - we were hanging out all night, partying. At one point, I took the public address microphone and gave it to this one guy. All these people were sleeping, it was really quiet and he starts snoring into the mike.”

“Oh no,” I said. “My friend R. spent the night on a Red Cross cot in the Charlotte airport - and you were the group of drunken assholes who kept her up all night! You have to understand something: With her, sleep is kind of a religion.”

I told him that when he got on the plane, he needed to find her and say, “Susie says I owe you an apology.”

Then I called my friend and told her the story. “When you see him, tell him Susie said it was okay to punch him.”

She sighed.

“I’m just going to punch him first.”

And really, who could blame her?