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Text messages from a concerned father went viral after his daughter posted screenshots of his minute-by-minute updates from his search-and-rescue mission for a missing hamster.

While Dan Veerman’s daughter Steph was off at college, he was put in charge of her hamster Chester. Steph explained that her father “ended up getting really attached” to Chester while she was away. That became evident when Chester went missing, sending Dan into a panic.

“Please call me as soon as you get this,” he texted his daughter, adding, “It’s an emergency.”

He explained that Chester had broken out of his cage and was hiding somewhere in their home. He repeatedly apologized, telling Steph that he was “wicked sorry” and that he would “keep looking all day.” He even offered to skip work to keep searching.

Steph told her father that wouldn’t be necessary, texting him, “You shouldn’t skip work. You are a lawyer and he is a hamster.”

Dan continued searching, even setting up traps with flour so he could track Chester’s footprints.

He eventually found Chester in his cage. Dan joked that his search for the hamster was “the most stressful day in my life since [he] took the bar exam.”

His heroic search for Chester earned him a lot of love online. Author Michael Marshall Smith tweeted, "If you need cheering up, I'm pretty sure this is the best short thread on Twitter this year."

Steph tweeted photographs of Chester after the drama had subsided, writing, “For all asking, this is Chester!! He’s the light of my life and not ‘just a hamster,’ however, my dad was having a panic attack so I tried to calm him down by saying that!!”

The exchange earned over 107,000 retweets and 428,000 likes from Twitter users who fell in love with Dan’s panicked search for his daughter’s hamster.