A Woman Saved a Drowning Squirrel Using CPR She Learned on 'The Office'

The CPR training session in season five of The Office didn't exactly do much for the employees of Dunder-Mifflin, but it looks like at least one person got something from the lesson.

Last week, Natalie Belsito, a freshman at Central Michigan University, spotted a tiny squirrel drowning in a campus pond. "I just couldn’t leave it,” Belsito explained to the CMU newspaper. "It definitely was drowning because it was really slow when we saw it and it started to dip its head under the water."

With the help of a long-armed guy who happened to be walking by, she was able to fish the animal out of the water, but once she did, she found that the squirrel wasn't breathing. Thinking fast, she dug deep into the recesses of her brain and pulled out some CPR skills—skills she learned from a certain beloved NBC comedy.

Those skills mostly involved chest compressions to the tempo of the Bee Gees' song, "Stayin' Alive." But instead of getting sidetracked singing, like Michael Scott does in the episode, Belsito heroically managed to stay focused and got the critter's heart beating again.

"It was a super cool feeling to know that I saved an innocent life," Belsito went on. "I watched a lot of Animal Planet as a kid, but the CPR part was literally all from that episode in The Office."

After the CPR, Belsito warmed the squirrel with a hairdryer as it regained its strength, and then released it a few hours later, happy and healthy, back into the wild, where it quickly scurried up a tree. "After he ran up the tree, we all were screaming and our minds were blown honestly, the whole night we couldn’t stop talking about what happened," Belsito said.

We didn't really need another reason for an Office reboot, but now Dunder-Mifflin's bad CPR training just saved a real life. What are you waiting for, NBC?

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