A friend of mine and I (we are both Aussies) had been staying at my Grandma's house in a rural village in UK and were trying to make our way back to London on Boxing Day. The fact that it was Boxing Day meant that no buses were running, so we started sticking our thumbs out to try and hitch a lift to the nearest town's train station. As you would expect, picking up two 19 year old blokes in the middle of nowhere was not an attractive proposition to your average passerby.
Eventually a guy comes along and picks us up. Tells us he hitched all the way across Europe back in the day so he empathized with us. Says he's on the way to pick up his son (our age) from work, a department store that happened to be on the way to the station.
His son gets into the car, understandably pretty bemused as to why his dad has brought two random stragglers with him!
We get to the station only to find that it's closed, because, yes, it's Boxing Day and trains weren't running either (we hadn't really thought this through). Guy says:
"Don't worry lads, all the family are around ours for Christmas dinner. My brother lives in West London so he can give you a ride there at the end of the night."
So we found ourselves, two foreign students, invited to a complete stranger's Christmas dinner party. We all had so much fun and drank so much that we completely abandoned the London idea and went back to my Grandma's at the end of the night.
And the kid who was our age that got picked up from work? He ended up being my Best Man when I got married 15 years later. True story!
This kind of reminds me of my brother's first trip to Taiwan.
This was in the 1980s. (Before cellphones.) The guy who was supposed to pick him up didn't show up because his motorcycle broke down. And couldn't get it fixed because it was Chinese New Year.
My brother arrived, not speaking any Chinese, surrounded by people who didn't speak any English. Who were having the biggest party that my brother had ever seen, and kept giving him food and inviting him places! He had absolutely NO idea what was going on!
After a few days of this, the person who was supposed to meet him finally managed to arrive, and my brother was hooked. Spent most of the next two decades in Taiwan.
does couchsurfing count? in poland trains are running on christmas, but i missed a connection and i was stuck in warsaw on chistmas eve. looked up hosts on couchsurfing which take guests without prior notice and found myself enjoying christmas dinner with a polish family.
After a concert in London, I missed the last train back to Lancaster. So I made a sign saying that I was on CouchSurfing, and some strangers invited me over!
After CouchSurfing started charging a monthly fee, I’ve defected to BeWelcome.org which is a European, open-source alternative to CS.
I was driving from South Carolina to Virginia, I was completely broke, and had exactly $20 in cash, and only a couple dollars in my checking account. I did my math wrong, and didn't have enough money for enough gas to make it home. I was trying to draft behind semi trucks and drive slow to conserve fuel, but it wasn't enough.
I called my bank at the gas station with my needle on empty and asked what would happen if I overdrew my account by $50, and the guy on the phone asked me to explain the situation. Afterwards he said I was good to go.
I asked, what does that mean? He said there's now $50 in your account. You can use it to fill up your car on your debit card.
I filled up my car and made it home. When I checked my account later, expecting to see an overdraft fee, there was a deposit of $50 from some account I didn't recognize. The guy had just transferred me $50 from his own account. I never figured out who this was, so ~18 years later, I'll take this opportunity to say: thank you sir.
I don't know that this is THE nicest thing anyone has ever done, but it was a small thing that made a huge difference in that moment.
I have a similar story. I was probably 22 and my car was in the shop, which was across town. When I got the call that it was ready, it was only an hour before the shop closed but I figured I could walk the distance in that time. After a while it became clear I wasn't going to make it, even running (which I had been doing for a bit). Exhausted and with only 5 minutes before the shop closed, I asked a guy at a gas station if he could give me a ride. He said sure, got me to the shop no problem and even refused money I tried to give him for his time and gas.
Looking back, it probably wasn't that big a deal for the guy. He only had to drive me a handful of blocks, so it's not like it was way out of his way or cost him more than a couple dollars in gas. But at the time, it felt like he saved my life. I was able to get my car back and get to work that night, and all was well. It's amazing how big of a difference a small kindness can make.
I was at a gas station once and someone approached me with a sad story about needing to get somewhere (I don't recall the details) and he was broke, could I give him some money for gas. This is a common scam but he seemed genuine and I was in a good mood. I said I did not have any cash but I would buy him a tank of gas, which I did. Then I went back to fill my own car, and the pump never charged me. I swiped my card, filled the tank, but the charge never appeared on my credit card.
About 10 years ago I was regularly withdrawing small sums of money every month, looking a bit poor, with old clothes, sometimes a bit torn or dirty. The bank teller just offered to give me a pair of winter shoes. I felt uncomfortable so I didn't take them, but thanked him anyway. I could've used them, but I think he probably offered them to someone else later on who needed them more than I did.
I didn't have any prior relationship with him, except going to him to give him my ID so I can get the money a few times.
Ah yes, I kind of grew up with the expectations bank people are supposed to always rip you of, so they cannot really be kind, only pretend nice to get money from you. So when I was a poor backpacker in australia wanting to cash in the small check from fruit picking work, I was suprised to find out, that there were normaly quite some fees involved to get the cash, but the bank person just smiled and said, it is ok in my case and I got all the cash with no fees.
It's really striking the number times people have downvoted my story, considering it is 1) a true fact about my life, and 2) eminently relevant to the topic of the article.
Even a thread about kindness can't stop the haters :)
Honestly, I suspect HN is starting to fuzz votes the way Reddit does. Some of the voting I've seen on my own comments lately makes zero sense, including weeks-old comments of perfectly neutral tone. It isn't worth worrying about.
Don't discount better and better "I can't believe it's not human" aping behaviour of personal bot armies of HN accounts - there's clear and obvious spam green accounts, and a steady drip of bland comment, weird voting behaviour, biege textual tone accounts that evolve through green and into background noise.
The admins potter about classifying coarse behaviour and looking to reject spam, voting blocs, overly weird AI comments, etc. The creators make their bot accounts less obvious with random votes, etc.
Comments made by recent accounts appear with green names until a grace period passes.
HN prefers "legit accounts" (subjective) - good faith comments from real people, reasonable uses of alias and spun up fresh accounts for regulars to say things without being part of their main history, etc. New commenters welcome.
There are obvious and less obvious dark patterns of bad faith account creation.
The admins do a pretty decent job, sweeping cobwebs without hitting real genuine people is an artform ...
Returning to the main GP point - there's a lot of low key background churn activity that can result in "inexplicatable" votes, some from bots and some from the general case of "people are strange".
If you see my message quickly enough (I can't remember how long the green lasts, so not sure when the deadline is for this example), here's the most recent green I saw to give you an example:
jonathan7977, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46264260 (linked directly to their comment but it shows green on the main thread also - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46263317)
5th grade, my best friend at the time was in a basketball team, just a small town league for kids. I never really played basketball, so I was planning to watch the game then we'd hang out. It was the first game of the season and my friend was getting his uniform from a table when a dad running things asked me what team I was playing on and I said no, I'm just here to hang out with my friend.
He shook his head and said, "No, that won't do. You're on his team, too" and handed me a jersey. Then he went ahead and paid my registration fee.
More than the money, it was the proactive nature of it that struck me at the time. The thing is, if I had asked my parents they probably would have signed me up. But it was one of those things where it would have never crossed my mind to ask. I ws as one of those kids that needed a push every now and then and rarely got one.
I never got very good at basketball but I never missed a game and had a great time with my friend. So not a tragic or desperate story, but still meaningful to me all these years later.
I agree with the replies to this saying that the fact it could lead to drama should not prevent people doing things like this, but I can see this causing trouble/resentment too.
I think a lot of the other unasked for examples given could also cause resentment. Perhaps often the right thing to do is just taking the risk.
Things have always been able to go wrong. That's not a reason to stop doing things. Oh no, you might get an ear full from an angry parent once in a while. boo hoo.
It's a bit dark, but I'm doing much better now, so happy ending. No need to wish me well or anything, I'm the happiest I've ever been (thankfully).
After reaching an age where bi-polar disorder goes full swing, I was unable to manage manic episodes; they'd spring up and I'd be awake for days and then crash horribly. I lost all hope that I'd be able to hold down a typical job ever again. I became a 24h/7d alcoholic with the goal of never being conscious and trying to sleep through life until it ended.
I was at the local shop where I bought my booze buying a bunch of beer and vodka around 7-8am. A guy near me at the counter made a comment about what a great party must be coming. I looked at him, probably dead-eyed, and said, "I'm an alcoholic."
He put his hand on my shoulder. He didn't say anything. It was just a moment of compassion. It was deeply kind. What was communicated was simply that someone cared and, to this day, I wish I had a way to thank him for that profound gesture.
I live in Minnesota and do not own a snowblower. Probably my mistake, but I always joke that I get most of my exercise in the winter. Snow is really heavy for those without context.
A couple years ago we had a particularly bad snowfall. The plow has a nasty hate filled habit of dumping all its snow in my driveway. I had a drift at the end of my driveway about 4 feet high and 6 feet deep. Literally up to my chest. I had spent a solid hour just chipping away at it trying to get my car out and had made very little progress.
Right as I was about to give up in frustration, a man in a bobcat drove by. Moments later he turned around, came back, and asked "would you like me to clear that for you?" I told him that would be amazing. Took him a couple minutes and then he waved and drove off before I got a chance to offer him any money or even thank him.
I think about this guy pretty often, it's absolutely the random act of kindness in my life I have appreciated most.
My grandfather was a farmer and scarcely went a day without hours of exercise in his life. He passed away after a heart attack while shoveling his paraplegic neighbor's driveway.
You don't have to be unfit to get done in by shoveling snow.
The heart attack danger is a perfect storm of two factors that do not normally occur together:
1) Extreme physical exertion - sudden, intense arm-heavy exercise often as a Valsalva maneuver (straining and holding the breath). This dramatically increases blood pressure, which puts acute stress on the heart and arteries.
2) Exposure to cold air exacerbating the strain on the heart with vasoconstriction (blood vessel constriction). Cold temperatures cause peripheral blood vessels (arteries and veins) to narrow. This forces the heart to work harder to pump blood through the constricted vessels to keep the body warm, leading to an increase in blood pressure. The combination of constricted vessels and high physical exertion means the heart needs significantly more oxygen to function, but the cold and high pressure can limit the blood and oxygen flow (myocardial oxygen demand is increased). Breathing cold air can also trigger constriction in the coronary arteries that supply the heart muscle itself, further increasing the risk of reduced blood flow and a heart attack.
I remember a friend who was really into his skiing telling me that ski instructors take bets on which overweight 50+ year old first time skiing city person would have the a heart attack first.
Snow can be very heavy depending on the water content. So sometimes it's really light and basically effortless to shovel, but sometimes each shovel full of snow is 10-20 pounds of weight that you have to throw over and over. That gets taxing very quickly, plus people don't generally warm up before doing this intense exercise.
It's not like shoveling snow is super dangerous. Most people don't die from shoveling the snow. But it can happen and it's worth slowing down and taking breaks.
Physically it is very taxing. Snow is heavy, and the movements aren’t typical of daily activity. Even for a modestly sized property it can take awhile.
I think it’s a combination of incredible weight, lots of aerobic activity, and the cold which masks some of the fatigue that might tell you to take a break. I am over 40, and over an inch or two just pay someone to deal with the snow.
It’s the going from zero to 100 that gets folks it seems.
Deep, heavy, wet snow is called heart attack snow for a reason. It sneaks up on you - a driveway you just cleared for years with normal snowfalls is all of a sudden a 10x workout from usual, and your brain doesn’t completely process this. Anything else at that level of intensity would likely trigger you to take breaks.
That said - I think inactivity is far worse. But I still make a point to go shovel my elderly neighbors walks here in Chicago before they have a chance to do it when we get particularly deep snowfalls.
For fat people, getting over heated when doing things is generally the limiting factor on how strenuous one can push the body. In the cold you can exercise a lot harder before you get too hot, so the person can stress the body more than they usually would.
after a nar nar day in pow pow cuttin freshies up to your nippy nips, you'll change that assessment!
(my email address was once inadvertently put on a mailing list for the planning of a bachelor party ski weekend, people I did not know or have any connection to, and that's the way they talked. i enjoyed it so much i didn't confess till they demanded to know why i hadn't RSVPed yet)
nar nar = from gnarly meant in the sense of "great"
pow pow = is powder, powdery snow
cuttin = skiing (i.e. leaving a trail behind you after cutting through the snow)
freshies = means fresh, new; not clear in this context, it could refer to "fresh snow" or "fresh tracks"
nippy nips = depth of snow is up to your nips (nipples) and you are cold/excited/goosebumps so your nips are nippy
this is generalized "california surfer talk"; the type of western man who surfs also snowboards, dirt bikes, jet skis, etc as well as clings to a teenaged hangout burnout lifestyle
I'm convinced bobcats (used generically) are the single most versatile and useful platform ever created. They're fun to drive and you can solve most problems with them. Not optimally for any specific task, but if something needs to be pushed or lifted or moved or pulled or flattened or piled, you can find a way.
An 863 with hi-flow 2 speed and a pivoting plow was the most ideal snowplow I've ever played with.
If you shovel the curb on your street “up stream” from the plowing direction, it provides a place for the plow stream to go and significantly reduces the amount of soon-to-be rock hard snow you’ll have to clear from your driveway.
Yep this is me. I get super pumped whenever we get a snowfall large enough to justify pulling out my ridiculously overkill snowblower.
The entire block on both sides plus the alley gets done those days. Neighbors here at first were skeptical since I guess it’s not normal (it is in Minnesota - every block there has a hero) for the big city, but now I get treats from various houses that catch me doing it.
I honestly do it for the pure joy of using awesome equipment I could otherwise nowhere remotely justify purchasing. Plus knowing I’m helping out my community in a small way is a nice bonus. Also helps me meet people and be social as an introvert.
The other side of the equation is my now dead toro had me covered in gas, frozen fingers, and plenty of swearing, with an itching desire to light it ablaze in the middle of the yard.
My best friend, his girlfriend, brother, sister and I piled into a minivan in July of 2018 and drove from Boston to SF. Best friend and I both took jobs there out of school and decided to make a trip of the life move.
We painted BOS > SF on the back window. At a gas station in Memphis a random guy walked up to us and said "Make sure you go to Graceland. Can't miss it."
We sort of smile and nod politely and then walk into the gas station to use the bathroom, reload on snacks etc.
10 mins later we come back outside and the same guy comes over "I bought you all tickets to Graceland, who can I text them to?"
Truly such a sick moment. Graceland was a highlight of the trip and to have someone just do such a random kind thing made it that much better. Long live Elvis, long live the King. Thanks again to whoever you are that did that. Respect.
I saw my mom do something as a child that really stuck with me. This was back in the 70s cause I’m old. It was summer in the Midwest we were in the car in a store parking lot gettin ready to leave. An African-American lady pulled into a spot beside our car. In front of her was a pickup truck with two men and a pregnant woman. They started accosting the lady telling her she had bumped their vehicle and now the pregnant woman was in pain. This was the 70s so everyone’s windows were down so we heard the whole thing. The gist was these people were clearly trying to extort money from this lady. My mom got out and dressed them down because she had been watching and the ladies car didn’t touch their truck. They sulked and drove away. The lady was very afraid and very grateful. This was a time and place where not a lot of African Americans lived. That really stuck with me over the years.
Back in the 60s, my mom befriended a black lady at work. I believe this was in Texas, so a couple of her (white, male) superiors approached her and tried to impress upon her that this was something that Just Wasn't Done 'Round These Parts. It didn't take, and she and the other lady continued to go out for drinks after work.
About a decade ago I walked El Camino de Santiago. On the very last day I had to catch a bus from Santiago de Compostela to the local airport to get on the flight to Madrid and head back home. I remember standing with my backpack on some random street at 6AM not really knowing where the hell the bus stop is. A woman walked up to me and asked me something. I could see she seemed frustrated and couldn't really understand what she was saying. Then started telling her in my very non-existent Spanish that I'm trying to get to the airport. She immediately grabbed my hand and just dragged me through all of the traffic straight to the bus stop a couple of block away ignoring all traffic lights. Then showed me on her fingers how many minutes the bus will arrive and walked away. Forever grateful to this woman for helping me not miss my flight home. I've had a number of similar encounters with strangers while on this trail. Spaniards really appreciate anyone dedicating their time to be on the trail and a lot of them go out of their way to accommodate people either with a free stay, food, a ride to a grocery store and etc.
I was driving to my first “real” tech job about 500 miles away from home at the age of 18. All my assets in my beater of a car, and about $120 in my bank account at the time.
My car broke down at a rest stop due to overheating and would not start again. I called a local shop on a Sunday afternoon and some guy in a tow truck pulled up and brought me to his place.
He knew immediately it was some fuel control module that dies when overheated, and just so happened to have a car he was working on to resale with the same one. I truthfully told him I probably couldn’t afford to pay him for it until I got my first paycheck and he asked how much I had. Told him about $120 to my name and he just charged me $100 and said I was good to go.
I (barely) made it to my new spot at 4am or so going 35mph to keep from overheating again. Flashers on the whole way there. Used my change jar to pay for my final tank of gas.
I didn’t fully realize how much that repair should have cost - plus the tow - plus the same day off hours service.
I think about that guy a lot and it’s informed my charitable giving ever since. I like to think I’m still paying it forward to this day when situations arise for me to help out someone in need who isn’t asking for a favor first.
Given the response I got from family when I called them to ask for a $100 loan to pay for gas on that trip informed my relationships with them for life. A stranger went out of his way more than supposedly close family did during my most dire (at the time) emergency I had ever experienced.
We had driven to a small remote village on Vancouver Island BC, to catch an early morning ferry. We had reserved a room at the only motel in town. We got there around 9PM. The a*h** owner ignored the doorbell and did not let us in (we could see him moving around in his attached residence). We went to a restaurant that was just about closing, told our story, and asked the owners if there were any options. Their friend, who was hanging around there overheard us .. he invited us to come over to his house and spend the night. The next day he insisted on buying us a wonderful breakfast.
When we got back home after the long trip, we sent him a nice sweatshirt with "New Jersey" on it.
My chain had slipped off the rear sprocket, wedged itself between the gear and the frame. I forgot my toolkit and I was unable to free it. I was miles out of town so a walk back was going to take hours. A guy on a motorcycle rode by, looked at me and turned around. He got off his bike, got his tools, and freed the chain in seconds. I was profoundly grateful. Years later, I happened across a cyclist in a similar situation. I helped him and I told him I was simply paying back the first guy who had helped me. It felt really good.
I'm something of a cyclist and I drive on a lot of roads where there are cyclists all the time. I keep meaning to make sure my car is stocked with some helpful bike tools or a spare tube or something. I need to get on that.
Same. I'm tempted to throw in a couple of spare tubes in the little pocket things between the interior trim and tail lights, where just now I keep a spare fanbelt, too.
I usually have stick-on patches and a bike pump as well as the normal Landrover-fixing tools, because you can have a toolbox without having an old Landrover but you can't have an old Landrover without having a toolbox.
You might want to have tubes with both Presta and Schrader valves (to match the existing tube on the other tire). Theoretically you could use either, but some rims might have a hole that's only small enough for a Presta valve (so I guess that makes Presta slightly more compatible in an emergency!).
I agree that there's flexibility in the sizes. When I wanted to stock up my work's garage with spare bike tires, I got four kinds in total (basically a small Presta, a small Schrader, a large Presta, and a large Schrader). This officially covered pretty much every common road and hybrid or mountain bike with something that was officially rated or matched to it. But yes, as far as I know, one could probably get by in practice with fewer than that and use things that are officially slightly mismatched.
Specifically, I got the Specialized "Standard Schrader" 700x20-28c and 700x28-38c, and "Standard Presta" 700x20-28c and 700x28-38c tubes (the smaller ones more likely for road bikes, the larger ones more likely for mountain bikes). These are about $8 each in the U.S., so a total of about $32 for the set of four. 700c is increasingly common, although there are several other diameters that have been or are being used.
Just having a bike pump can be pretty helpful in many circumstances!
I find that cyclists often help cyclists. ‘Help the next guy’ being a phrase I’ve heard a few times.
A $5 tube is so small a cost. Not having one can make a minor inconvenience into an utter shambles if you have to call home go a lift from 50km away at 6am.
You know what else is a nice thing to carry? A wad of paper towels to get the grease off. Even if someone can repair their own bike, they often don't have a plan for the grease.
I've handed out paper towels to 4-5 people this year and they were all delighted.
And alcohol wipes. Just the other day someone stopped to give me alcohol wipes after I put my chain back on. The alcohol cleans off the grease completely, unlike paper towels. I'm carrying a pack in my car now.
I’ve started waxing my chain rather than oiling it.
It’s a hassle, but doing 2 at a time means the admin is much reduced.
There is a huge amount less dirt and grease in my life now. Even when I change it to re-wax it I don’t get dirty. I probably get 2-3 weeks, 500-600km out of each waxing.
Interesting. My usual approach at home is actually to put a few drops of cooking oil on my hands, which dissolves the grease; regular soap can then remove the oil.
I already have some alcohol wipes in my bag as part of an emergency medical kit. I'll add a few more for grease emergencies. :-)
One summer I got a ridiculous number of flat tires in my 300,000 mile jeep.
One of those happened in a heavy rainstorm. The ground was soft, and I don't know why exactly, but I couldn't get the jack to lift the jeep high enough to lift the tire.
I was on a country highway near my home, with no cell service and maybe one car every ten minutes. I tried a few spots, even just halfway in the lane--I was afraid, though, because the rain limited visibility for other drivers.
A man pulled up behind me in a Subaru. He wasn't local; he had come from Tennessee to paint a local scenic spot. He not only lent me his jack, but he got out in the pouring rain and helped until it was done. We both had raincoats, at least.
He said that just the day before, he had a flat of his own, and someone stopped and helped him solve some problem he couldn't get around, too.
I doubt that's the nicest thing a stranger ever did for me, but I sure appreciated it. Stopping and helping may be a small kindness, but it can feel like a miracle to the recipient.
Parker's Automotive is a pretty cool youtube channel, guy goes around in his truck and mostly does work for free. Seems like every day he's finding someone stopped in a lane.
I think he's been able to parlay it into an awesome youtube career, and the amount of people who stop on the street to sing his praises is unreal. Sometimes 15+ in one video, it's nuts. He's a hero to the people. Love to see it.
I like this. I hope this thread fills with many more comments.
I think it's important to remember especially in traffic and such that cars aren't cars, they are people. I have no idea the real ratios, but imagine 20% are genuinely good people, 60% are just going about their lives, and 20% are miserable for some reason and drive like miserable people. It's easy to think everyone else is an idiot and become aggressive, but remember it's a small percentage who actually agitate you.
Now to answer the question. I guess it's when I was a kid, I'd completely torn my ACL but they wouldn't operate until I was done growing. I don't know how old, 12 maybe? I was in Washington DC running across a busy street when my knee slid out of place and I fell in the road. A Mercedes stopped, purposely blocking both lanes of traffic, and a husky middle aged black lady in scrubs got out and dragged me out of the road onto the sidewalk. She asked if I was ok, and I was as it happened here and there, and off she went. It was such a kind gesture in a city that seemed so cold and always on the go.
> I have no idea the real ratios, but imagine 20% are genuinely good people, 60% are just going about their lives, and 20% are miserable for some reason and drive like miserable people.
Lately, this is my experience in general, not only cars. Though I want to say both that 20% and 60% are genuinely good, and that first 20% are readily above-and-beyond.
In the big-name college town where I live, which still pretends to be warm-fuzzy (the remaining hippies are silver-haired), eventually you pick up on a pervasive undercurrent of selfishness.
A lot of people only get into the prestigious places because they look out for their own interests, and being here is only temporary and transactional.
And a lot of people are strained by the high cost of living for lousy conditions, and are just trying to get by.
Still, I've seen, for example, delirious (opioids?) street people slump off a bench on the gritty main drag, and quickly be surrounded concerned and helpful passersby who looked like yuppies. (And the only phones out were multiple people calling 911, no social media content creation, just genuinely helping and then disappearing.)
I believe the same: everyone wants to be in New York / Munich / pick your local fashionable place. Everyone moves there to be someone. But not everyone can be someone, so there are a lot of unhappy / selfish people.
Most people have to be a bit selfish, to acquire greater money/power/status than others. You usually don't come in first in the race, by pausing to help another runner who fell.
A lot of the people just trying to get by, on the other hand, have it harder because of the externalities of someone else's selfishness and sometimes cheating.
But, people just barely getting by can go one of two ways: they may or may not decide to help another person who falls.
Some just getting by will think we're all in this together, and we help each other, no matter what the jerks do. I think this is actually pretty popular philosophy, and is my own thinking.
But other just getting by might think they can't afford to help others, or that it's every person for themself. That philosophy happens, too, and is unfortunate, and it can be contagious. But much of the helping-others group is resilient.
Since you mentioned NYC: A very minor anecdote, but once, when I day-tripped to NYC for a startup interview, I just missed the last train home to Boston. I went to the booth where I saw an employee, and asked them what do I do. Her initial reaction was gruff indifferent dismissal, like is a stereotype of people in NYC. (A stereotype being something like, you can't care, because there is so much misery and crazy around you, and other people's problems are just too much to deal with besides your own.) But I think she picked up on my implicit Pollyanna belief that she would help me, because, an instant later, her whole tone changed, and she projected warmth and caring, and told me how to get home on a bus. (The startup was offering me the position, but I declined, because I decided NYC was too rough for me at the time, the nice lady in the train station notwithstanding.)
My family lived in an apartment near a cemetery when I was 10, the complex stretched along the old cemetery wall made out of massive granite stones. Nearly all of the people living in the complex were elderly.
When I came home from school I would sometimes kick ball against the wall and I could spot old people looking at me from the windows, they would stare at me for a long time.
One summer an elderly woman came out on the balcony and invited me to come up for ice cream, my parents had warned me to beware of friendly strangers but my judgement at the time was that it was a neighbor so they must be friendly.
I entered and to my surprise the woman wasn't alone, she lived with her husband who was sitting in an armchair and they both looked to be in their 80s. They seemed very happy to have me, we sat down on the balcony and I remember feeling a bit awkward as these two strangers looked and smiled at me as I was eating the ice cream.
I don't think they ever had any children.
This memory sometimes resurfaces, and now at 41 I realize how sad and wonderful this was at the same time.
We moved away shortly after and I never saw them again.
I was at a waterpark as a young teen and ended up trying the wave pool, but even being tall for my age I was shorter than a typical adult. When I first went out the waves weren't turned on/going yet, but once the waves started everyone moved forward and the crowded pool compressed even more, plus I got pushed even deeper into the deep end, and basically I sank down because I couldn't really get any space to swim and everyone else was standing. It was so packed with people that eventually (without my realizing at the time) it became impossible to move arms and legs enough to stay up, kinda like a crowd surge but in the water.
I must have been too shy to think of climbing onto the person next to me. My best guess is that I was "jumping" up off the bottom to get brief bits of air while hoping it wasn't in the middle of a wave. After doing this for a bit, could be just seconds, I started to panic (I really couldn't tell you how long, felt like forever). I heard a whistle and somehow this lifeguard was there through the crowd within seconds (they had been standing along the wall of the pool but I was more in the middle).
The people all around me shoulder to shoulder hadn't even noticed what was going on, I still feel amazed the lifeguard could pick me out from thousands of heads and get to me.
(I don't know if this can be considered "nice" cause it was their job, but it's something that has always stuck with me).
I was a lifeguard for about 8 years in high school and college. I pulled out close to 20 people. Never had to administer CPR: if you get there quick enough it’s maybe a bit of coughing.
I wonder if any of those people remember that.
I also cannot sit by a body of water with people swimming without falling back into lifeguard mode. I’ve pulled out a few people as a civilian. Nothing serious, but it would have been. Little kids and beaches are a rough combo.
PSA for anyone near water: Drowning people can act the opposite of what one might expect. No flailing, no splashing, no yelling, just quietly disappearing. It’s good to know the real signs to watch for. [0]
I planned to propose to my girlfriend at sunset on the coast. We walked along a path and I got out my camera, ostensibly so we could take photos of ourselves using a small tripod I brought. I was going to take a few photos using the camera remote, then propose and keep taking shots to capture the moment.
As I was setting up the tripod on a bench, and man who was walking by offered to take a photo for us. I didn't want to explain what was going to happen, so I declined. But he insisted that he had the exact same camera, and would be happy to take some photos.
I lowered my voice so my girlfriend wouldn't hear, and said "Ok don't react at all, but I am about to propose to my girlfriend." He nodded in understanding and calmly took the camera. He took a few posed shots and then gave me the signal. I got down on a knee and proposed (completely forgetting what the speech I had prepared, of course), with him taking photos all the while. I'm certain that the photos he took (in manual mode!) turned out much better than what I would have captured at sunset/dusk, via remote.
A year or two later I mentioned to my then-wife that it would have been nice had we invited the man to our wedding. She laughed and said that she always assumed he was a photographer whom I had paid to be at the location at that time. It took quite some convincing before she understood that he was just a Nikon photog who was in the right place at the right time.
I met a Tesla engineer on Reddit a few years ago. We got talking, he referred me to Tesla, and I ended up getting an offer for what was basically my dream role.
He was a complete stranger and incredibly kind, supportive, and helpful throughout the process. Still grateful for that. Small acts like that restore a bit of faith in humanity.
It also reminded me of a Steve Jobs quote:
“Most people never pick up the phone. Most people never ask. And that’s what separates, sometimes, the people who do things from the people who just dream about them. You have to act, and you have to be willing to fail. If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.” - SJ
I actually struggle with this quite a bit, took me a while to realised, but wonder if you have any advice to get over it? (Aside from just succeed more)
I'm struggling with this too. First, figure out if it's a true fear of success or really fear of failure in disguise. (I'm afraid of getting hired. So what? Then I have to perform. So what? But I might fail. Ahh, there we go.) Secondly, figure out what messages people around you gave you when you succeeded or failed. Especially any behaviors that gave you a feeling of fear, shame or disgust. Third, start placing your own judgment of what constitutes success or failure above what others think of as success or failure. Set your own goals and criteria for completion. Lastly, don't focus on the outcome, focus on your inputs. Work patiently, slow down until you reach the quality you want to reach.
Super actionable, will give these a go. Reading through this I now see that I get stuck on the first step and just beat myself out about it instead of making progress.
You're most welcome, glad you find it helpful. And yes, "Why are you hitting yourself?" is not just a movie trope but a pattern of behavior to break. Takes a while to hunt down old patterns like that but keep at it, you'll figure it out for sure. Seek and you shall find
3-day bike trip, NYC to Provincetown. On day two, our group split up and I was riding with a close friend. 15 miles into the 100-mile day, we got our 3rd flat. We had only carried 2 spare tubes.
We had barely pulled our bikes onto the sidewalk when a woman in a sedan slowed down to ask if we needed help. We said yes and she quickly pulled over. We piled our bikes into her car, trunk open, and she drove us to the nearest bike shop.
Turns out her family member ran the shop.
Truly saved our day. We made it to Provincetown and 15 years later still remember her so fondly and are so thankful!
a couple of friends of mine from high school rode their bikes coast to coast together one summer. the more heavyset of the two (one was a stick) got 15x the number of flats.
just throwing it out there, the fact has never left me, tho, it's never come in handy either.
I had finished my hamburger, zoning out. I had my guitar with me, having had a belowpar band practice, while waiting for my therapist appointment. Life was heading downwards in a slow, but steady, fashion.
This wonderful woman came over and asked if I wanted a hug. It warmed me to my bones. She said that "people should do that more", or something along those lines, and disappeared.
I don't remember her face, I just remember the warm feeling in my chest.
It was snowing. I scraped the windshield of my car. When I was done, I turned the key - and the battery was dead. I shrugged, gathered my belongings and was about to go back into my apartment building. But a woman who has just arrived in her car came up to me. And she asked, “Is your car not starting? You can use mine if you like.” I had needed seen here before. I took it. I returned it with a full tank in the evening. I’ve since had two other random strangers lend me their car, both in Germany and in the US. It’s something I wouldn’t have believed people would do. And it’s something I wouldn’t have accepted out of fear. But I had learned: Being kind and accepting kindness are two sides of the same coin. The one cannot exists without the other.
I wouldn't be comfortable borrowing someone's car, especially in the snow. If I were GP, I'd have driven it up next to my car, used the battery to jump mine, and thanked the stranger.
We got a new fridge a few years ago, throw the old one up online for free. It worked just fine, but it was one of those freezer-on-the-left and fridge-on-the-right, split down the middle. Tolerated it for years, and finally saved up enough for a new one.
So, someone comes to pick it up. Well, 3 someone’s. A older woman, a younger woman, and a younger man. The man was missing a decent amount of teeth and had a decent amount of prison ink.
The car they came in to pick up this enormous full size fridge was probably only slightly bigger than the fridge. It wasn’t even close to being possible to fit.
I looked over at my 25 year old truck (I love that truck more than any other vehicle I’ve had) and made a decision.
“Hey look man, I love this truck. You can borrow it to lug the fridge. Please bring it back. I’ll even level with you, if you don’t bring it back odds are I’m not even going to report it stolen, I’m just going to be bummed. I get notes on my windshield all the time asking if I’ll sell it.”
Guy kind of looks at me. The other two people glance at each other, and the whole thing felt very strange. So we load the fridge and off they go.
I looked at my wife and said “I’m never going to see that truck again, huh?”
After about 4 hours I gave up. They stole it. I was strangely ok with it. I made the decision, knowing the risks, and had accepted them.
3 hours after that, they brought my truck back. The guy gets out and kind of started sobbing. The older woman (I assume the mom) was crying. Guy gave me a huge hug. Everyone was incredibly emotional.
I didn’t ask, but can only assume they considered stealing it. I also assume they used it all day long based on the mileage.
I'd do it in a heartbeat in a situation like this, except that I have no idea what the insurance implications are.
Actually, maybe someone here knows: How much would I expose myself lending my ~$20k car with full coverage to a random idiot? For the sake of argument, say I'm reasonably assured they are legal to drive.
I looked into my policy once, and it said that if I let someone else drive my car, the coverage from my policy would revert to the state minimum, around $15k.
If the driver has insurance, that would probably get tapped first, but if they don't have enough it could end up hitting your policy.
When I looked into it for my situation, a one-off thing was fine. You'd get into trouble if you lent your car for an extended period of time or if it was something like you didn't tell the insurance company you had a spouse and they drove the car regularly.
Not exactly -- legally speaking people are always primarily responsible for their own actions.
However, basically all insurance in the US extends coverage to people who the owner allows to drive the car.
But if you borrow someones car and you cause damages that go beyond their insurance limits, you can be personally sued for the remainder because you are still liable for your actions as a driver.
There are some exceptions where the owner can also be held liable for damages that someone else does, especially when they do it recklessly (e.g. lending to a drunk driver)
Traveling around India I ate some food at a train station before boarding an overnight train and became extremely sick. I arrived early into Bikaner and as I started wandering around I became more and more delirious, to the point that I don't have clear memories of what happened after for a day or so. A (not well off) family however found me, brought me to their home, put me up in a rooftop sort of room, called a doctor, and then fed and took care of me for the next few days. They refused to accept any payment except for the rehydration packets they'd bought. I am forever grateful to them and I think of it and try to pay it forward whenever I can.
This is my earliest memory. When I was two, and did not yet know how to swim, I was visiting with family who had a place right on the river Thames near Henley. I was running around with my seven cousins, but I was the youngest and at some point found myself alone. I wandered out onto the towpath beside the river, where they had a small jetty.
Earlier an older cousin had been out in the canoe and it looked easy enough. I put one foot in and realised my error immediately, toppling into the water. I remember clearly the water bubbles going by and thinking 'Oh dear, my mum is going to be so angry about this.' I came back up and saw a couple now running up along the path -- they had seen me go in.
I don't remember anything else. I'm told the man fished me out and then there was a great kerfuffle as I was hung upside-down and coughed a bit. My cousins got a massive earful from my mother, who was furious with the eldest in particular for losing track of me. My father taught me to swim.
The man was thanked profusely, but we don't know his name. I hope he had a wonderful life and I'm grateful for mine.
Not a stranger but strangers
I was returning home from an event early evening. Being absorbed in my thoughts. I got both my front tires free spinning without traction in a ditch.
Although this was in Nigeria, we have this certain camaraderie through hardship, it was still extremely surprising seeing a group of 6 men come out of nowhere, having nothing to do with each other aside being passerbys join hands, exerting sweaty effort to get my car out a ditch by 8pm.
Reminds me of when my wife would drop her loaded-for-touring motorcycle in a parking lot. People would crawl out of the woodwork to run over and help her pick it up.
I’ve dropped mine on rare occasions, and nary a soul even looked my direction. :-) (But thankfully I’m a grown boy who can pick it up myself.)
I high-centered my car on a drift coming out of the Taco Bell drive thru - not a minute passed before ten or so people appeared out of nowhere and pushed me over and out.
Literally, the moment before there hadn’t been anything around but me and that Taco Bell.
We had a blizzard that dumped 3 feet of snow in a weekend, my car got stuck, and about 6 people came out of their warm cozy houses to help push it. On a separate occasion, years later someone driving by stopped their car to help when they saw me stuck on the side of the road.
We grew up very poor, and I can't count the number of times someone helped us through a difficult situation - there are plenty of times we were on our own and there wasn't any help, but also times when someone noticed and helped. The help was always so appreciated- it lessened the suffering considerably compared to the times when we were on our own with whatever problem.
Me, Austrian and two Austrian friends were doing a road trip through western Canada. We had a rental car with a remote key fob, and forgot the key fob on the cars roof when driving off for a multi-hundred kms trip. It obviously got lost and when stopping the engine at some random town along the way, we couldn't start the car anymore. (Luckily we had the trunk open when realizing that.)
An elderly lady we met at the parking lot offered us, three random strangers in their 30s stay at her place for the night. Her nephew even drove to the camping area where we headed off and probably lost the key. It was heart-warming.
After returning home we sent her a huge Christmas packet with typical specialties from Austria. (Pumpkin seed oil and others. :-) )
When I was 20 or so I worked at a pizza place (Godfather's Pizza in Kansas City, FWIW). I suppose because I had a high school diploma, the manager had taken a liking to me and made me "shift supervisor" — which is kind off like assistant to the manager. Anyway, I was often left in charge to close the store with a few of the high school hires.
I often noticed a family come in on Tuesdays or whatever when there was some kind of promotion like get a large for the price of a medium or whatever. They often had some coupon you cut out of a newspaper so they could save another $2 or whatever. They were quiet and I decided they were not very well off.
I had a flashback to my own childhood: where going out for pizza with my sister and (single, working) mom was a real treat for us (and with the coupons, or free drinks).
When they order I make an extra large rather than a large. Unfortunately, this night, I think the pizza was left a touch long in the oven and it comes out with the cheese a little browner than I would have preferred. I was a bit embarrassed handing it to them and then even more embarrassed when they didn't even bat an eye but quietly accepted the pizza.
I decided nonetheless to make them another pizza and when it was done I brought it out to them in a to-go box—apologizing for the first pizza.
I can't know how it made them feel, but I was happy to be in a position to do that. (To hell with corporate profits, ha ha.)
I'm continuously delighted by the whole open source software ecosystem. I'm using nixOS with KDE and this setup has made me feel incredibly powerful and excited about computers once again. I'm very grateful to the thousands of open source contributors that have made this possible.
Not sure if this qualifies as a "stranger", but a nurse at the UCLA Cancer Center in Santa Monica helped my family and I when my sister was on her last days, dying of cancer. It was a bunch of little things: she got us into a single-bed room; she cleared out a maintenance closet for the family to meet privately with doctors; she did some sort of meditation with my sister that helped calm her; she "translated" what the doctors were telling us; she told the other nurses (and the security staff) to leave us alone (visiting hours). Mostly, she was a human to us, not just someone doing their job. I'll never forget the horrible experience of watching my sister dying, but Nurse Suzanna made it so much better. She's an amazing person, and I'll be forever grateful to her.
At 15 years old, I stupidly rode my bike across the street in front of my high school on a red light. It looked safe, but a car was speeding in the opposite lane, and I had to turn back to avoid being killed. So now I was in the lane I had just crossed and another speeding car hit me, throwing me (and my bike) about 40'. I was dead on the street, and a stranger stopped to give me CPR. After a month in the hospital with a broken back, and the doctors scratching their heads because I wasn't a paraplegic, I was eventually okay.
I never got to thank him. All I ever learned about him is that his name is Mark.
I was trying to adjust the tension spring on a motorcycle rear-shock absorber in the parking lot where I worked. Suddenly I rotated the ratchet past a detent and it sprung with a tremendous force that locked on to my finger—holding it with an iron grip (literally). It's a little difficult to describe the mechanism, but I can tell you the pain was intense and immediate and I struggled with one hand now to try and pull back the steel cap that was holding my fingertips in its spring-loaded vise. I was pretty sure in some amount of time I would have to assume I would lose the finger.
So I looked around the parking lot in desperation and I saw someone leaving their car and head in to work. I had no idea who it was but I shouted "help!" to them.
The guy jogs over to me, looks at the situation and just cooly but quickly asks, "Tell me what you need me to do." (What an engineer, huh? I'm sure this guy was an engineer.)
I explain I need this collar pulled back against the tension of the spring and between the two of us (my one good hand) we just barely get it lifted to where I was able to tear free (yeah, the skin tore) my finger.
Wow.
Crisis averted. I profusely thanked the guy and then he just went on in to work.
Thank you stranger! It was made especially clear to me after the two of us struggled that I had not a prayer on my own.
Stopped in the dark on a December night on the shoulder of an interstate junction to change a tire after I had a blowout while driving. Under normal circumstances, I probably could have handled it myself, but I was getting about four hours of sleep a night because of tinnitus.
I was very nervous when a random guy stopped. My initial thought was, "Am I about to be robbed?" But it turned out that he was just a local aerospace engineer, and it was his hobby to help stranded motorists.
I was driving home with my family from a long trip having just bought a really cool camping trailer, a 1979 Airstream. Our vehicle died on the side of the road in a rural area. The owner of the property where we stopped was mowing his lawn and came over and asked if we needed help. When it became obvious our vehicle needed a tow, he used his own truck to bring the trailer onto his property. And he kept it there for a couple of weeks while the engine in our vehicle was replaced.
I'm really not sure what I would have done with the trailer if he hadn't offered to help. We were more than 600 km from home.
In the UK we used to have a nationalized rail system. People were always rude about the late trains, stale sandwiches etc. But I once managed to leave a bag Xmas present on a train. I only realized when I got another train. They were so helpful, they managed to find the bag and have it sent on to me. I think we lost a lot of that good will when the UK rail system was privatised. And the privatised trains were still late, but much more expensive.
I think making system more efficient often squeezes the kindness (and resilience) out of them. I have spoken to NHS workers who said that they used to do various unpaid overtime but, now they had opppressive management, didn't any more. Obviously things need a level of effiency, but there is a point beyond which it becomes counterproductive.
I've left my bag with my laptop in a station a year or two ago and went to lost property and they called me when they found it and I got in back in a day or so, I guess if they have a specific lost property office that's kind of their job but it's nice that no one tried to steal it or anything
I agree. The railway now is mean, willing to prosecute, unhelpful and expensive
I've read various accounts of people trying to reclaim lost baggage and it's a Kafkaesque process designed to be totally useless
But the railway operators are 50% nationalised now. Northern, TransPennine, South West Railway, LNER, Greater Anglia, c2c, ScotRail, Southeastern, TfW are all government owned.
And the forerunner in increasing fares the last couple of years has been...the government. They renationalised various operators during and after COVID and are now busy decreasing rail subsidies and increasing fares.
(yes even with the freezing of some fares in April. It's only some fares. And prices had been going up multiple times a year in many places for a few years. There is a wider picture and other schemes happening pushing up prices)
Maybe Great British Rail will slowly and surely return us to a less mean system. Time will tell
I left my bag on a train recently. I’m not sure I can describe “describe the bag using an online questionnaire that took about two minutes to complete” as Kafkaesque… bag returned in a little under one week.
Did you try contacting someone to get back sooner? That's what the people did in the cases I referenced - just people not answering the phones, dead lines, "computer says no”, passed around, refusal to help etc
I guess you being somewhat fine with waiting a week meant nothing important was in the bag.
The trouble with the UK is we continue to put up with the bar getting lower and lower each year. Honestly someone would defend it taking a month to get a bag back as being fine
The UK railways are expensive, and I have a car, so I very rarely go by train. But all those road trips cost everyone else, in terms of congestion, pollution etc. Maybe the railways should be regarded as critical infrastructure, run at a loss and subsidised accordingly.
Brings back memories of a recent 16 year old stood in tears whilst they took her details to prosecute her because she was travelling on a child ticket "but my mum always bought me a ticket".
No mercy. Fuck those guys.
Same guy that stung me for not having a ticket when every other day they'd come round and let me buy a ticket on the train.. I even went to the window at the destination for a ticket, and then got referred for a penalty fare. Fuck that guy.
Yeah for many years the railway would let a lot of things slide even though they've had the legal right to prosecute.
Many people find out the hard way just how many legal powers the railway has (they have even more they could enforce, such as dropping litter, or playing music, or being inebriated - criminal offencs with no excuse)
The social contract of buying a ticket and behaving in return for good customer service has broken down, it's gone. It's really the entire of the UK at this point.
I was doing my 3rd 70.3 IM and I was doing badly. Something was off, I had been loosing power since the second half of the bike leg and come run time I was barely making 8 min/km. I was supposed to be doing 6. Seeing no point in continuing, I had decided to step off the course. Then a woman (older?) recognized me and asked me how I was. I told her about feeling horrible and stopping. She told me that’s stupid, that I should continue, it’s not so long any more. I did and, against all rational odds, against all logic, started feeling better and did my first ever negative split hm. It was likely dehydration and the aid stations helped. I don’t know who she was. I was so out of it, I did not recognize her and do not remember her face despite her knowing me by name. That experience of hope against all odds…
One of the nicest things a stranger has ever done for me, and I still wish I had the wherewithal to ask for the persons name - I was flabbergasted at the gesture and somehow I managed to stammer out a thank-you but not much else.
My team and me had just won 2nd place with a prestigious competition and decided to spend a chunk of the prize money right then and there: Wanted to get myself a nice backpack (Victorinox) but as I was a student at the time and the prize money would come much later, I came a significant amount of money short... This person just handed me, in cash, a hundred dollars. The backpack is now over 10 years old, and I still use that backpack daily with lots of pleasure, and only has minor scuff/wear and tear marks. It's been a fond memory to revisit, also because the memory is attached to my first time visiting Seattle (and Microsoft HQ). If the person that handed me that cash all those years ago reads this: Thank you so much, I would love to share what I've been up to.
There's a corelation between how nice people are in general and how well laws are enforced. More consistent enforcement means people trust that other's are not getting away with stuff and so they can settle into assuming the best most often, instead of having to worry.
I feel like many places have forgotten that. Maybe law enforcement got too expensive or there were too many corrupt police but so much now is no longer enforced and so the selfish "it's okay if I can get away with it" types are winning.
Reading through these things, I was thinking about how being a high trust society is incredibly important (though to be fair, I harp on this a lot).
When I was in Cape May, I walked to the beach, and realized I'd forgotten my access pass. The person at the entrance let me borrow her bike to ride back to the house to grab my pass and bike back. You do that when you trust the people around you to behave honestly. Any time you do something to reduce that trust of strangers (it doesn't have to be crime), we erode the high-trust environment and make everyone a little worse off.
Thanks to all the kind strangers discussed in these comments for having and building social trust through your actions. Collectively, we build a safe, happy society through small kindnesses.
My old BMW GS (motorcycle) engine jumped timing chain for whatever reason and completely gave up the ghost on a busy highway in Poland, a random motorcyclist on a streetbike saw the white smoke cloud and understood what happened to me as I coasted to the side of the road, he stopped, asked a few details and said "get on your bike, I'll push you to the nearest shop". I didn't speak Polish and his English was not great too, but we managed to understand each other. To this day I do not know how he managed, but he was able to control the gas on his bike, align himself to the back and off the side of my bike and kept giving me these push impulses so I could keep moving, and moving we were, we travelled ~6 miles to safety doing ~30mph, I thanked him and we went out separate ways. This experience feels surreal, I literally didn't spend any time in danger lingering on a busy road side or waiting for a trailer, which can take hours.
I could write all day about the times people helped me that I know about, and there's others I suspect, and surely others I never suspected.
One that comes to mind was when I was on my own as a teen, and fortunately had a community college co-op student internship. My coworkers looked out for me in various ways, both professionally and personally, as if it was just ordinary for them.
I also found some similar above-and-beyond goodness by people at Brown University.
So that's what I knew in adulthood, until later disillusionment.
I still try to promote the way that I know exists, and I recognize a lot of other people who live that, or are ready to switch to it.
I had many cases of help from strangers in my life. One was not from a total stranger, but still.
I was couchsurfing with a bicycle, and was not able to find a place to stay on the last day. So, instead of trying I asked a guy where I stayed the first day if I can return. Not only he agreed, but also helped to get to the airport with my packaged bike.
Another case was when I stayed in Jordan, and the guy who I rented apt from helped us so much for free. He helped us to get to the dead sea (with two bikes, no less!), fought for the price with street traders so we could get an honest price and so on.
And the final and best story is about a people who found us trying to put up a tent during the huge storm in iceland.
They invited us to spend a night in their camping cabin and shared their dinner with us. This happened after we were going 12 hours through the storm with a heavily packed bikes. IT felt like an angels touch. I almost cried due to happiness (I hardly ever cried back then).
First thing that comes to mind is a young man in Tokyo taking me and my then-gf to our ryokan after we asked him for directions. He walked over 20 minutes with us, clearly using up his entire lunch-break at work, to get us right to the door, going completely out of his way. We were just asking for general directions, but he took us all the way. We couldn't believe how gracious he was, and luckily we were able to gift him some chocolates from our home countries. Not a good lunch, but I hope he enjoyed them.
I live in a neighborhood where every street has a cul-de-sac. Outside our neighborhood is a busy road. About 6 months ago our 100lb Great Dane escaped out the front door while we were bringing in groceries. My wife and I chased her around the neighborhood trying to get her back. We lost sight of her and she eventually ended up in the middle of that busy road. A young college aged kid saw her in the road stopped his car and chased her back into our neighborhood. We cornered her and I grabbed her collar. The guy headed back to his car after the dog was caught. I should have got the guys name. I was so angry at the dog I didn’t really know what to say to the him but I am still so thankful. It could have been a very sad day for our family without his help.
I lost my phone while I was out once. A stranger found it and started calling people in the contacts with my last name (I don't have any lock method) figuring they'd know a secondary way to reach me. That worked and I got in touch with him, and then he came by and delivered it back to me at my house.
Back when my daughter was small, I was waiting in a line to get to the ticket window at the ballpark. A woman walked up to us, said my daughter was lovely, and gave us 2 tickets to the premium section of the park (the fancy bathroom section as my daughter called it). We saw Manny Ramirez hit his 500th! What a nice gesture. Whenever we went back, and when I was making a bit more money, I always bought one or two tickets after that to give away. Being unexpectedly nice in an unexpected way not only put a bit of joy in my life, it prompted me to do the same. That reminds me. I need to do something unexpected for a stranger. Thanks for the reminder!
Took a few months off of work and decided to bicycle through the Philippines. One day was a very hard mountain stage, driving from Bacolod to San Carlos, on Negros island. Arrived at the top completely exhausted, layed on the roadside in an attempt to recover. Suddenly a car stopped and a young couple of locals handed me a sandwich and wished me luck. I'll never forget them
I was backpacking in Australia in 2008. I talked to a girl when I was driving up the east coast und she gave me her brother’s numbers and said to call him when I was visiting Perth (west coast). I did, he invited me to live at his house for six weeks for free. After that, I was invited by a German to live at her house in Melbourne for another two month. I was so short with my money and that both were incredibly kind to me.
1. on A9 near nurnberg we caught a ride with a musician from munich (he played trumpet and showed us his music when i asked if he had any recordings in the car). it was heavily raining and it was late in the night. as we were approaching munich, he got off the highway and i was worried how we were supposed to get back on the highway in the middle of a effing night, but he just drove home and we stayed overnight. we ate breakfast together with the whole family (wife, kids) and he drove us off to the nearest autobahn entry on his way to the conservatory (he used to teach there) - we were going south, to italy. that's first top of my head, surely there is more. good times. we connected, big time.
Not the nicest thing, but when I was grocery shopping for Thanksgiving a few weeks ago, a stranger shared their “secret” for picking out good sweet potatoes (she was making sweet potato pie). She picked out a few for me. Just one of those warm fuzzy moments that we never get enough of.
I was riding my bike home from REWE (supermarket in Germany) with two big bags of shopping. As I crossed the road I mounted a small bump that caused both bags to split. In that moment I sort of gave up as all my food rolled across the asphalt.
A Turkish lady got out of her car, went to the boot and got three heavy duty plastic bags out. She helped pick up the groceries, pack it into the bags, all the while ignoring traffic and halting cars. I said my most profuse thank you in German and all she said was: no problem. I still remember it often.
I was a small child at the zoo. I had lost my parents in the crowd, and was scared.
A nice black man (this was important because I grew up in a white neighborhood and hadn't encountered many black people before) knelt down to me and asked me if I was okay, if I was lost. They brought me to the zoo office where they called my parents.
I'll never forget how strange and different they were to the child me, and yet how kind they were in the sea of scary strangers.
When I was young, my future wife and I went on vacation to Tahiti. We took a bus from our hotel to the Capital probably only 3 to 5 miles away bust still a good walk away. I thought it would be easy to get a bus back both because I knew a little French and because I assumed buses could either go clockwise or counterclockwise around the island. Long story short my assumptions were bad and we got lost.
We stopped at a bus stop to regroup and there were two local men, construction workers as I recall, sitting at the stop. They got us back on track but more than that, they cracked open a 6 pack of beer and shared it with us. I dont know what those beers could have cost but it was not cheap. They were regular guys and we were lost rich tourists. In no world I would have imagined would they have shared those beers with us but there they were and they ensured we got to the hotel as well.
Just checking prices and labor rates. Those guys gave like an hour of their work to lost strangers. I guess it's not the biggest kindness but it still made a lasting impression on me.
I would have loved to retire to Tahiti based on how wonderful the people there were to us but I gather lots of people have the same kind of experience with the hospitality and now it is too expensive to retire there :p
I love going out of my way to help people, but hate when people help me or give me gifts. I don’t know how to experience “pure” gratitude that isn’t overwhelmed by guilt.
In my second ever job, lawn care, a client wanted to give me a Christmas gift of some cash. I had a personal connection--I worked closely with their son in my first job.
I hadn't been offered a gift yet at work, and it felt wrong for some reason--I was young and naive. He insisted many times, and I refused.
When it was over, he seemed hurt, and he treated me in a less friendly way afterwards.
So that was how I learned the lesson. When someone wants to give you a gift, you accept it graciously. It's your duty.
My problem is, I feel bad if I don't put the gift to good use.
Couldn’t hurt, because you’re robbing others of the opportunity to help. And, frankly, you’re not alone, I constantly run into folks that feel the need to reciprocate or otherwise make it transactional.
I was driving from Sacramento to Reno, and there was a bad snowfall up in the mountains. I ended up getting struck in a small country town, and couldn't get up an iced hill. I thought I was going to be stuck there the entire day (at least), but a stranger pulled up in their pickup truck—with four wheel drive—and towed me up the hill and to safety. That's the most significant act of kindness I can remember—from a complete stranger.
I ordered the wrong thing on doordash yesterday and the store manager called me to ask if i was sure i wanted a pizza with no toppings. good on her for not delivering me a plain crust nothing pizza. she even had it in the oven already just in case. s tier human being
i got carried away reading, evening came .. i decided to leave, but that park was already closed and unlike most parks where i usually go, this one has absolutely no way out, they lock everything..
he noticed me, told me there's on spot where the fence is missing a bar, enough for a person to escape.. but not for my bike which means i'd have to leave it chained to a tree during the night.. not thrilled by that idea
that kid sat on the fence and help me lift the bike, grabbing the dirty wheel and everything. the bike was out, and i used the thin hole to get out.
felt crazy to me that this kid went that far to help a stranger
i went back there a few times with some money but didn't ran into him, until a month later our paths cross so i could thank him
Did a road trip in our teens from Melbourne to Sydney. On our way back we stopped at the petrol station at Pheasant's nest. We were nearly out of petrol, didn't have any money. My friend had some cigarettes, so we started awkwardly trying to sell a pack to people, just needed about $20 (back in those days petrol was a lot cheaper and obviously the dollar had better value). We approached a lady with her kids, told her our story of needing petrol to return home, and we had some cigarettes if she needed. She straight up gave us a $50 without asking anything in return.
This has been burned in my memory going on for more than 25 years. I have gone over and beyond for both people and strangers, but I have yet to be in a similar situation to pay it forward.
I was riding my dirt bike way the heck out in the mountains where there was no service.. at some point I realize I lost my phone. I went back to look for it but it was hopeless. I used my friends phone to log into my apple account and set it to lost mode (so it has contact info when someone finds it, and alerts me when it gets service again). Later that day my wife gets a call from my phone, we meet the guy at a gas station, and pick it up. He lived pretty far away and he insisted on meeting me halfway, and didn’t seem like a person of means. He did accept a finders fee at least.
A lot of people have done a lot of nice things for me, that one kind of stands out since he didnt seem like he had much.
I have a lot of such stories while riding dirt bikes. Kind of need to depend on the help of others if you get wedged or injured.
I will also never forget the CEO who gave me 3 paid months time off when I was hospitalized / sick. I think it was a risk for him since it was unclear I would be able to work again, but fortunately I made it back.
Oh, you jogged my memory. Coastie here again. Soon after moving to the west coast, 1980-ish, I lost my wallet around Easter, on or about University Ave in Palo Alto, and a kind stranger found it and dropped it off with police, IIRC. He wouldn't take any more than a lunch or dinner at the Good Earth. This was B.C. Before cellphones.
On the other side of the coin, I was leaving a thrift store in San Leandro and saw some black thing on the road. I was stopped at an intersection and picked it up. It was a wallet with $500 in it and a woman's out of state personal and business ID., but no local address or phone number. I took a real chance and left it with the thrift store staff, hoping they could find her. Perhaps she was just there? Well, they said later that they found her through her bank, and returned it to her. I forgot if it was before or after, but I did purchase two Klipsch Heresy Speakers there for $50 total.
I got a working visa for Japan when I was 18 (in 1999), and one night while moving from one hostel to another on the weekend, I fell asleep and missed my train stop. I woke up in the middle of nowhere. It was the last train, it was raining, I had no money on me and the banks were already closed. As I stood there under an awning two ladies asked what I was doing. I brokenly with the help of my dictionary explained the situation. They didn't understand me but flagged down a business man who spoke a little English and he called a taxi, sent it to my hostel and paid for it. It was quite expensive.
I think if I'd go down memory lane I would come up with quite a lot. But one sticks out immediately.
I was in Thailand on a bus, with only Thai people, it was a really local bus. The bus would stop around every 30 miles/50 kilometers. I didn't know that. I needed to get off at a particular stop as it was close to the meditation retreat I was going to (Phitsanulok). I miss the stop. I figure it'd be fine. I didn't realize the 30 miles thing. So after half an hour of driving I ask the bus driver when it's going to stop. He said he'll stop in another 15 minutes.
It was about to get dark. I asked him if he could please stop now. I was 25 miles away, it'd be rough but 8 hours of walking is doable. He stopped, now I was on the side of the road. It had gotten dark.
I noticed houses next to the side of the highway. It was a strange sight to walk next to a highway and see houses next to it. In one case, I saw a father, mother and 2 children outside ready to go inside.
I asked them for help. They didn't speak English but listened. With our hands and feet and a bit of Google Translate, I got to tell them my story. The father looks at me with understanding eyes and gestures for me to get on the back of the moped. I get on the back. He brings me to a police station. He says they'd take me to Phitsanulok.
In the police station, no one was there. There was one light on and blinking. The room itself looked grey-ish white. I felt like I was in the beginning scene of a horror film. Before the father left, I asked him why there was no one here. He told me that the policemen were having dinner and they'd probably be done in an hour. I sat there for an hour.
The policemen came out, they looked at me surprised. They spoke English, I told them my situation. They said "alright, get back in the car". And they just gave me a whole ride of 25 miles to where I exactly needed to be.
To say that I was grateful would be an understatement. I offered them money, because while I know that they are just working, I reckon that this type of stuff is not in the job description of a policeman. I was purely offering it out of gratitude. They said no. I offered 2 more times, they still said no. I did my best to show I was incredibly grateful and I think they got the message, haha.
Thanks to those Thai policemen, and other acts of kindness I've experienced over the course of my life, I will pay it forward. Not because I feel I have to, mostly because I see how wonderful that attitude actually is.
I love that things like Google Translate make this possible now. If someone has a phone/computer, you can break the language barrier, it really helps compared to the alternative
Not as meaningful as some of these but one that stuck with me.
I had a door to door selling summer job in America at 21 after leaving university (I'm a brit) .
The job was primarily on the Eastern Shore in Delaware. Everywhere I went a kept hearing about the famous crabs they cook. One chap whose door I knocked on asked if I'd had any yet. I told him I hadn't.
He sat me down there and then with his whole family to eat some at a meal with them.
I wish I could find them again and thank them properly.
I missed last train due to delays and there was a group of in the same situation. One nice person offered me to that I can sleep on their couch. And they were so nice to give me a ride to the station the next day.
I was so angry at first when I found out that this was my last train and I missed it but it turned out to be great story I can tell :)
Thank you strangers, I'll repay it back to somebody in the future
I was at an antique shop in Alameda about to buy a pulp sci-fi book. It was just a couple of bucks, nothing expensive. But the card reader wasn't accepting my Apple Pay. Another guy shopping there offered to pay for me. I told him I could Venmo or PayPal him the money, but he wouldn't take it. It wasn't a big deal in terms of money, but he didn't have to do that
On one of my many trips to Europe, I was wandering around the downtown area, and having walked a great deal sat down on a park bench to rest.
Two very beautiful young ladies came up to me, and said you look like you need a hug. Instantly my spidey sense went on red alert, as I figured these two were pickpockets or scammers or ladies of the evening, since I was much too old to be of interest to them, and no woman has ever remarked that I was handsome. I asked them what they were doing, and they said they were just doing a project spreading kindness.
So I said ok and one of them gave me a truly wonderful hug, and I said thank you and they went on their way.
When I was 12 years old I got run off the road while riding my BMX bicycle when a car pulled into my lane to park on my side of the street.
I was going about 12-20 mph and could not stop since I only had rear brakes. I just locked the rear tire and the bike continued sliding on the dust covered road side.
I went over a platform and into a small garage pit used for burning trash. After I stopped rolling, I dusted myself off and thought, "well, that could have been worse". Then came a man running towards me, grabs my elbow and pulls the head of a broken bottle out of it.
Blood started spraying everywhere of course.
After one of my friends that was riding with me used his shirt as a tourniquet, the man flagged down a (private) mini bus(that provides public transportation), to me to the hospital, stayed with me then, paid my bus fare and then took me back home to my neighbourhood.
I never saw the man again even though he probably lived in the neighbourhood next to mine.
Recently in NYC, I was offloading my car when a girl with a box of croissants and cookies came up to me as asked if I wanted a croissant. She that she mistakenly bought more than she could eat.
I looked at her as if she fell from space for a second and she noticed. She then said she bought the from a nearby bakery and they were perfectly fine as she continued eating one herself. I hesitantly took one, which was still warm and bite into it. It was great and I told her girl so and thanked her.
I went inside with my croissant in hand and told my wife what had happened. I got the scolding of my life for eating food from a stranger. I had to throw the rest of the crossiant away of course. That sucked because that one bite was so good.
> grabs my elbow and pulls the head of a broken bottle out of it. Blood started spraying everywhere of course.
I learned in first aid courses that if something is stuck deeply in a wound, you should not pull it out, but instead fixate it with some bandage and go to the hospital like that. The reason is that it can start bleeding a lot more if the object is removed.
Just now, I'm travelling through India, and today was particularily rough. (I'm trying to go from Delhi Airport to Agra). Multiple Ubers turned out bad (scams, no-show, or fucking with pickup point). I spent several hours in this limbo getting nowhere. I end up taking a train without ticket on advice of multiple people around me, since the counter refused to sell me one.
Turns out, wrong train, going slightly the wrong way. But a guy walks up to me in the train, asks me where I'm going, and starts to help me get to where I need to go. He arranged a bunk for me, talked to the conductor for me, bought(!) another train to Agra for me, called hostels in Agra, etc etc. I've had multiple such encounters here in India, of people going so far out of their way to help me here, something you would honestly never see in my country Germany. It's like a strange incongruence, with one fraction of the population hell-bent on fleecing you for all you've got, and another that will go way further out of their way for you than you could ever imagine.
This correlates with tourism. Low touristy places you standout and people treat you nicer than normal.
In touristy places you are just a target. It’s just different places have different strategies for fleecing you. For example in Japan you probably wouldn’t even know you got ripped off but India they are likely so obvious about it you never get fleeced.
If you find the sheer number of people too much, do visit either Himachal Pradesh or Uttarakhand! You will find THE kindest people there. Though be careful of leopard and bear attacks in Uttarakhand right now!!
Oh, I just came back from Shimla actually. I stayed in Narkanda for 2 days to do some hiking, and Shimla one day, though I didn't interact with many people there. My next stop is Kochi, hopefully things are also a little quieter there.
Make sure you try to talk in English and see. Most people should know or atleast understand english there. And Kerala food can be spicy and it's hot out there. Make sure your drink enough water and stay hydrated.:)
Kochi is also a very nice city, but if you're coming from Shimla or even Delhi you're going to find it sweltering hot probably. It's about 26⁰C (80⁰F) right now... (I'm close to Kochi and honestly in these temperatures it doesn't even feel like Christmas)
Ps, Kochi can be quite bustling. The more remote and rural towns (like Munnar) are a relatively safer bet.
I was on a train from Miyajima to Hiroshima on a random weekday morning and an older gentleman sat next to me. I am a white American and I could tell he wanted to talk with me but was hesitant so I said good morning in my terrible Japanese. He wanted to practice English so we chatted and he ended up insisting on taking me to his local okonomiyaki spot in Hiroshima where he was clearly a regular. We had a 2.5 hour lunch and he hazed me with food beer and shochu and introduced me to the other octogenarian regulars. It was a really cool experience.
Eating at nice restaurant with my entire family. When we finished the meal the waiter came out with a dessert and said that someone across the restaurant paid for our entire meal. I was shocked, I looked around and I think I might know who it was, but they were already gone. That was probably a $150-$200 dollar check. I'm still shocked to this day.
A few years ago, I was in the drive through of a Starbucks on the east side of Seattle. A very shiny Porsche 911 was in front of me, and I was kind of rolling my eyes. Who needs to drive a Porsche to Starbucks? Douchebag.
Whoever it was paid for my order. Kind of a record-scratch moment, just completely changed my mood and was a good reminder to not be negative for no reason.
Some years ago, I left my wallet at home and had filled my car with petrol at the petrol station, and the lady behind me paid for it and refused to give me her details so I could return the money.
Similar to the author’s story, I crashed on my bike going pretty quickly on a busy road. No serious injuries but I ended up with scrapes and a softball-sized bruise which lasted over a month. But after I fell and got off the road a man sitting on his porch eating dinner asked me if I was ok. I told him what happened and he quickly grabbed some tools to fix my bike and alcohol and bandages for the wound. His roommate came home and assumed we knew each other but nope he was just my guardian angel. I hadn’t thought about this in a while… now I’ll be sure to remember it again.
I worked on a summer camp in the USA in the 1980s. We had a day off and went into the small local town (Kent, Connecticut IIRC). A small group of us British students went into the local bar for a beer before we went back to camp. The barman/owner was quite slow about giving us the bill for the beer. This is going to be expensive, we thought. But he just said 'It's on the house. Tell people Americans are nice when you get home'. It was a small kindness, but greatly appreciated by some poor students.
I missed an unprotected international connection out of New York due to a weather 6-hour delay.
Another passenger saw me crying on the phone with my father when I had to ask him to help me buy a new ticket back home. He (and another elderly passenger) cheered me up and offered me to stay with him until the next flight out the next afternoon.
Took me (male, 21) to his room, took care of me until my flight and told me to pay it forward.
It was one of my first intentional trips and it had all gone to shit even before this event. I flew back home with like 30 euros on my account.
About six months ago I was walking home from the grocery store in Sparks, NV and decided to stop by the local swap/meet. I had all my groceries in bags that I was carrying. During my time there I was jostled by the crowd and felt a little uncomfortable. When I got home I dumped out my groceries and found _two_ boxes of Girl Scout cookies that I didn't buy (I hadn't even seen any for sale). I had been reverse pickpocketed! I'm going to remember that for a long time :)
Out in western Kansas, riding my motorcycle to go see my dad who was working in the field. Didn’t know the gas light on my bike was busted. Engine stalled in the middle of nowhere on an early May morning. I hiked for a bit and knocked on a farmhouse door. The guy and his wife offered me a coffee, breakfast, and a gallon out two of gas (85 miles of range on a bike). Can’t thank them enough.
I’ve tried to return the favor 10x fold to strangers.
I'd been (reluctantly) going to Mozambique for a service job on a vessel, reluctantly as my grandmother was rather worse for wear and I feared she was nearing the end. She urged me to go, though, and to tell her all about it when I got back.
She died while I was in Maputo harbour, waiting for the vessel to dock so I could get to the airport and back home.
Can't remember much of the flight from Maputo to Jo'burg, but from South Africa to Frankfurt was terrific, considering the circumstances.
A stewardess quietly pulls me aside as I am about to board the flight to Europe and asks me something like 'Gee, you look terrible, what happened?'
I just shrug and tell her my grandmother died a few hours ago, we were really close, and I felt terrible for not being with her &c.
Next thing I know, she's hugged me for a long time - to the annoyance of people queuing behind me - before dumping me in a vacant seat in business, tells me she'll be back the moment we're airborne.
Sits down in the adjacent seat, starts asking me about good memories about my grandmother, talks to me throughout more or less the entire flight, ensuring me that her job is to make me as comfortable as she can given the circumstances.
Once we landed in Frankfurt, she asked if I was OK going on alone - she'd be happy to accompany me all the way back home if I needed her, Lufthansa would make that work, no worries.
We still exchange Christmas letters every year; I mailed this year's on Friday.
One time in Boston a stranger literally pulled me back to the curb as I was about to walk out in front of a turning UPS truck. (This was long before smartphones; I was just being an oblivious idiot without any technological assistance.)
I was gifted an ivory keyed Steinway grand piano in high school by someone who heard me play a couple of simple pieces in a retirement home. I did not know him but a family member was an occasional acquaintance of his. It is a stunning instrument.
When I was very little, like 4 or 5, a new family moved in on the street. I was curious, so I took my little pedal-racecar down the street to where they were moving in to say hi and welcome to the neighborhood. The dad of the family caught me staring wide eyed at his enormous collection of CDs and vinyls, and asked me what my favourite song was. I thought for a while and then told him track 3 from Nevermind by Nirvana. He told me to listen to the local radio station the next day at 3pm.
Turns out he had his own show on the radio, and he played my song! Well, Nirvana's song, but the one I picked. He even dedicated it to me and everything! I thought I was bonafide rockstar for years after that!
I guess I should qualify the story by saying, he was a stranger at the time, but not for long. His son was 2 years younger than me and we became best friends, and he was like a second dad for me too. But that came later.
Bobo is not with us anymore, but here's to his memory.
It was threatening to rain but I thought I could make it to my destination so I bolted out the door. Half way it started pouring. I stopped in the middle of the side walk, under a tree. I was watching a cat further down the sidewalk that was in the same situation so I didn't notice a lady pull up with her car.
She just handed me an umbrella and drove off after I said thank you.
When I fainted on a crowded bus i Buenos Aires (as a tourist from Sweden) the bus driver stoped to check on me. When I wanted to get off and rest a while, two other passengers got off the bus with me to make sure I was okay.
I'm sure there must be more instances, but that's the first one I can think of.
I was in a city in a foreign country once and completely lost. A local showed me the way to my hotel and walked at least a mile with me. This was a long time ago but I still remember her kindness.
I went to Tokyo a couple of times for different reasons, and was frequently amazed by the people in the street or behind the counter in a restaurant, etc, who would stop and take the time to help me, often in perfect English, do whatever it was that I was failing with!
Yes! I have stories like that from every Japanese city or town I've been to. Easily the most hospitable, kindest locals I've ever encountered while traveling.
Although, I am often surprised by how kind/helpful/generally nice people are when I travel. Even in places like Paris or Glasgow, that have a reputation of being a bit rude or at least reserved toward outsiders.
When I was a kid, my uncle was driving me to a piano lesson and his car ran out of gas at an exceptionally long red light. Some young lady picked us up, drove us to the nearest gas station to get a jerry can, and back to his car to get us back on our way.
The first thing that comes to mind is one time when I was pretty drunk, in my late teens, hurt my legs trying a very ambitious(stupid) jump and then passed out at a bus stop. Woke up later, no phone battery, in the city about an hour away from home and nobody else I knew around.
Limped into a 24hr kiosk and asked to borrow their phone to call for a ride. Got a no. Tried explaining the situation, no sympathy.
A guy who happened to be in there saw that I was really not having a great time, came over and just hugged me and said it was gonna be alright and let me use his phone. No idea who you are, wouldn't recognize you if I ever met you again, but thanks for that.
In all seriousness, people probably do more favors for attractive strangers. And HN is probably populated with average-looking people, at best. In some ways, this means that the stories posted here will be of true altruism.
On the other hand, if you asked a bunch of great-looking people what strangers had done for them, you'd get a bunch of stories about people who were very kind (but perhaps not entirely altruistic in their intent).
I'm open to the possibility this is wrong. But I'm pretty sure that HN is mostly male (85%?), and that men are more likely to do good deeds for attractive women strangers than women are likely to do good deeds for attractive men strangers.
For one thing, women (especially smaller women) would be wary of offering a ride to a man or letting him into her home.
If you read a few of the posts in this thread, you qickly notice a pattern: people in need are being helped.
Maybe you are not very adventurous? If your life consists of only hotel trips, best you can expect is a free breakfast upgrade or something like that.
If you're hungry and out of energy on a hike, someone might give you a sandwich. If you're drowning, someone might save your live. The situations you're in determine your experiences, not your looks.
Just recently I was going through my wallet downtown and I inadvertently dropped a $20 bill. A street denizen in a wheelchair picked it up and scurried to catch up with me and handed it to me. He would not take anything more than a thank-you.
They broke my ribs when I had a cardiac arrest, doing vigorous CPR. Would not be posting this now if it wasn’t for them. I was basically alive when the air ambulance landed, but wouldn’t have been otherwise
When returning to Washington University in St. Louis, I was walking a few miles with some luggage. Someone offered to carry one piece with me to the dorm. It was only after reaching the dorm that I realized she was barefoot!
I know some people get annoyed at this because of the unspoken obligation to keep it going, but more than once I've been in a drive thru line where the person in front of me paid for my food. Whenever it's happened, I've tried to do the same for the next person. Just little things like that where I realize some stranger who has never met me wants me to have a better day mean a lot.
During COVID, by father was dying in a hospice center (from something else, not COVID). Because of the circumstances and the condition of the medical system, it was impossible to get into where he was to see him, and the staff was too overworked and understaffed to find a way to connect us to him. He was alone, fragile, dying, and terrified.
As my mother and I sat in the reception area fighting with the hospice administrator, a medical transport pulled up and unloaded another patient. After putting the new patient back in their room the driver walked up to us as we were sliding into a heated argument with the hospice administrator.
She asked the administrator what the problem was and was told that policy was visitors can't be going into the patient area and it was very firm. They'd had issues with the local government about being slack about it. The driver turned to me and said something along the lines of "here's what we're going to do:
Since I can apparently run around freely in this place, I'm going to find your father and put a star in his window so you can always find where he is.
Number two, I'm going to give you a set of full hazard gear.
Number three" and she turned to the administrator put her finger up into her face and very sternly said, "they are going to hire you as a part time employee, in maintenance, or IT support or whatever, and your hours of employment here are going to be whenever you need to visit your father."
she turned back to me, "but this doesn't mean it's a free pass, you are going to wear all of this hazard gear whenever you come 'work' here, promise me that okay?"
She then took the administrator off to a side room, had a conversation, and I had a piece of paper to sign about 30 minutes later making me an employee of the hospice.
I made it into and out of the hospice without incident for the next week until we decided to bring my father home to die as he wasn't receiving almost any care there. I don't know what the ambulance driver and the administrator discussed, but I suspect it was the absolutely woeful state of the facility.
The look on my father's face when a head-to-toe masked man entered his room the first time, and when I took my mask off to show him I was there for him, and how the terror just simply fell from his face, is something I will always remember as is the kindness of the driver who put herself out there for us.
The period was incredibly hard, beyond the situation with my father, the medical system was in absolute shambles, and as my father's health was rapidly deteriorating, it was among the only kindness we received during that wretched journey.
I had some young family drama which kept me from studying for my first oral university exam. so I talked with the prof about it. he told me to bring a sick leave attestation from Dr such and such - or to come and give it shot. gave it a shot. "you can do much better that's obvious. I'll give you the weakest passing grade or I fail you and you redo the exam. your choice." wow.
Didn't expel me from university for an insensitive prank I accidentally sent to the administration instead of my friends. I discovered the university's email server was unsecured and thought it would be funny to send fake emergency alerts to my friends from the official university email. I mixed up the "from" and "to" fields though... oops.
I was sent to collections for a rabies vaccine (well the immunoglobulin post-exposure part was the real expensive one) that was supposed to be reimbursed under a pharma/CDC program. Something like $17k.
I begged the guy that helped me fill out the paperwork for that program to give me something proving the hospital was paid. He broke the law and gave me the whole month's reimbursed list of everyone in that program. Hospital made the situation go away in less than a day once they saw I had it.
I will never forget his name since he put his ass on the line doing that and I never met him in person, just a few phone calls.
It is really interesting the very high percentage of comments are people who don't live in the US, or the story happened outside the US. I don't say this in a snarky "the US is full of assholes" way, just that's interesting and I'm not sure why that would be.
I did the tallying for you. When specifically two countries were mentioned and it wasn’t clear which country the good deed happened in, I awarded 0.5 points to each of those countries.
The top country that is specifically mentioned is the USA. Of countries that are specified as non USA, they accumulated 34.5 points. The USA accumulated 37.5.
The tallying was done at 4:03 PM UTC on December 14, 2025
Was in SF a day early for a conference, place I was crashing at was right next to golden gate park so I went to hippie hill to go hang out. Cute couple invites me to smoke with them, so I offered them beers. We spoke for a very long time, I don't remember much of it. He mentioned he went to art school, was having his first solo exhibition that week and showed me some of his stuff, which I genuinely thought was great.
When he heard that I had just moved cross country for work, he insisted on giving me one of his originals and some signed prints he just had made, as a housewarming gift. I joked about how badass it was that he had signed prints, he shrugged and played it off like they were only using school supplies to make a little fun money. It was just an A4 sized watercolor, it hung on my fridge for years with the prints
A decade later I had a friend over and they were asking about them, I couldn't remember anything so they reverse image searched on their phone. His exhibition was at fucking MoMA. His career took off after that and it is worth a decent chunk of change. I went and got it properly framed the very next day
I am running through my memory bank, and can't really think of one outside friends and family.
OTOH, I seem to be "that stranger" whenever possible. And that's mighty satisfying. People I've studied under or assisted with computer support have a habit of getting Nobel Physics Prizes. I have aggressively looked for and found, owners of lost cell phones and ipods.
Sorry to disappoint!
BTW, a friend is an M.D. While I was visiting his home, his cat scratched me, and I asked if he had any betadine. He didn't. So, you never know. Having been in the Coast Guard "Semper Paratus" always ready, I tend to bring small tools and first aid with me when I drive, but the only application so far was someone whose battery died in the SFO cell phone lot around midnight, and I had the jumper cable handy. The more serious one was when I was coming home and saw a light flickering in the neighbor's detached garage. Well, he wasn't welding. It was an electrical fire, and I made sure they knew about it post haste (they were watching TV in the front room). And that's about it.
My wife and I plus our (then) two small children were driving though France from the UK. I was towing a caravan and suddenly realised that the van had got a flat tyre. No worries, I thought, I have a spare, a jack and a wheel wrench. So, I pulled over and got to work changing the tyre. To my horror, I immediately discovered that my car’s wheel nuts were bigger than the van’s, so my car wheel wrench was useless for the flat van tyre! And all I had otherwise were small hand tools.
I should add that this was back in the days of dumb phones, long before GPS devices were common in cars, so all I had was a small-scale paper route map of France. I had no clue which way to go to find help, and no way to find a phone number. It was late afternoon, and we were still a long way from the campsite. I was starting to sweat.
But then a French woman with her daughter pulled over in a small car and asked if we needed any help. Using a mixture of my poor French and sign language, I indicated I needed a wheel wrench, which she pulled out of her boot. My joy and relief were obvious. I change the van wheel in no time, thanked her profusely, and off she went.
But there was twist in the tale: my hazard lights had been flashing so long that when I tried to start up the car, all I got was that sickening tick-tick-tick sound of a dead battery. Could my day get any worse? But then I remembered that my van had its own battery! A quick battery swap-over later, and we were back on the road, and had a great holiday, all thanks to the kindness of a big-hearted French woman who was kind enough to stop and offer help to foreign strangers stuck in the middle of nowhere.
I'm convinced that gratitude is a superpower. If you can recognize and acknowledge the many good things that come your way, your life will get better, as will everyone else's.
A few years before Covid, I was driving to work in San Francisco and I stopped at a Philz Coffee in Marin County, as I often did. It was a usual workday morning and everyone was looking down at their phones while waiting for their coffee. We were all preoccupied and eager to get to work.
All of a sudden, some guy who looked to be in his 20s comes in clearly not from the area. He was dressed like a backpacker and he seemed lost. He was studying the coffee menu and saying hi to those around him. His friendliness and being-in-the-moment-ness really touched me, helped to pull me out of myself. When I went to pay for my coffee, I told the cashier that I was going to pay for his coffee as well. While I was still waiting for my coffee, he went to pay and learned that I had already paid for his coffee. I was embarrassed, but I will never forget the look of appreciation on his face.
This is not to me but a friend of mine was climbing Mt Fuji in _winter_ (this is a serious thing you need to be prepared for, alpine climbing with lots of snow and ice) when he slipped and started sliding down the mountain out of control.
When he was about to fall to his death a father and son that happened to be there in a struck of luck managed to grab him and save his life. My friend had banged a few rocks in the way down so his leg was fractured and they had to help him down for hours.
They saved his life and risk theirs to ensure he had the best chance. They visited my friend in the hospital where he was grateful and teary eyed. And then the father and son asked him for money, straight up. My friend of course agreed on an amount to them, all in all, he didn't know how to repay them anyway and this was oddly simple. I found everything heroic and strange at the same time but a good story.
When I was about 3 years old, a man in a car tried to abduct me right in my front yard by offering me candy to lure me closer.
An old woman we did not know witnessed this from down the street, recognized what was off about the situation, and rushed over yelling, scaring off the man.
Not sure if I would be here today if not for her. My parents never were able to find out who she was.
In general, I've found that people, even strangers, kind of look out for you. I've only had occasion to need this in America, but every time strangers have helped. What I found fascinating was that even late in the night, on a dark highway, a young woman would stop to assist. What a safe society.
Two of those occasions are when I crashed on my skateboard, and when I crashed my car. Both times, a young woman stopped to help me[0]. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to say when people haven't been kind to me. A girl on a train gave me the book she finished reading. A homeless guy helped me push a car[2]. I left my car open once with everything inside and a passing woman closed it for me and left a note.
But also the society built here assists competently when individuals cannot. After a motorcycle accident in the city, the ambulance was there to pick me up apparently (I wouldn't know, I have amnesia) within minutes.
We've always stopped to help when we can and have many times (a few in SF here[2]) but it is gratifying that others are also like that. The other thing I like is that people don't mind asking for help. I was at the Safeway up in Diamond Heights, all in my motorcycle gear (which some can find intimidating) and this old lady asked for help with her car boot. Why on Earth would I know? But it turned out to be a quick fix and while I sorted the latch out, this other elderly couple talked to me about the husband's Ducati which he used to have.
In fact, I have come to think about this non-kin pro-sociality as being some sort of sociocultural superpower among the societies that can practice it. It seems to me that the most successful societies practised this. Even in the age of empire, it seems some societies were more capable of pro-social outcomes. British imperialism was a brutal thing in many places and especially earlier in its time, but compared to intra-tribal violence among indigenous peoples it seems almost civilized. The bare minimum rise to civilization seems to have been to replace terminal fatal violence with non-terminal subjugation (which seems to have been a hard thing to achieve). The Maori left only a hundred or so Moriori alive, and ate and killed the rest. By comparison, the British had the Maori in parliament.
Similarly, the father of the Charlie Kirk shooter encouraged him to give himself up: placing his kin at the mercy of his non-kin society. I think this kind of non-kin pro-sociality is where the magic is in a successful society. But producing that is hard. As an example, no matter how much a young woman would want to help a man waving her down on the side of the road, she should not do so in Somalia. American society (and many others) has solved, for the most part, the problem of stranger trust. That enables this kind of cooperation, which enables large-scale coordination, which helps a society prosper.
This reminds me of what A Splendid Exchange says about the Qu'ran having rules on commerce and law: thereby allowing the Islamic world to prosper because any Muslim of the time could meet another Muslim of the time and know they lived by the same law (enforced by God, one presumes). This allowed stranger-trust across the seas.
Overall, quite fascinating. These societal innovations are devices that last for some period of time and provide a massive boost to those societies. Certainly whatever Dutch system existed to enforce joint-stock capital, a secondary market, and derivatives allowed them to coordinate to be the power they were at the time[3]. I wonder what the next such device will be.
The default of humanity seems to be to cooperate[4], so the hard part here is finding the device that fights exploitation of pro-sociality.
You might like reading Darwin's Catedral by David Sloan Wilson. It's a recent take on the old idea of group selection, a theory that attempts to explain the human drive to cooperate. In that telling, it would take some form of religion to coopt that drive and allow human groups to grow large and be nice to strangers. Or not nice when they're seen as out group. I find this explains a lot about us.
My rc drone lost signal and flew out of range several miles away. Being from a small town, the person who found it eventually found out it was mine, and he returned it.
I don't think so, but people are so distracted, by their phones, that they don't notice that other might need help.
There's also two or three generations of people now who are absolutely terrified of talking to others, so you have to exhibit so level of distress for them to act.
Generally though, I feel like people want to help strangers, and social media makes that easier to do. We have a local organisation that helps those less fortunate, and last year they wrote on Facebook a few days before Christmas that they had five familie (I think if was five), who hadn't been able to get help elsewhere and if people had food, or money they could spare. Took them just a few hours to ensure a nice Christmas for those families. Without social media, we wouldn't have known, and it basically only Facebook that can reach so many generous people in such a short time.
On the institutional level there's grounds to believe it unfortunately (less welfare support, more military etc) Was thinking about the term "suicidal empathy" that some politicians have been bringing up lately (wrt migration policy). It's like a new derogatory jargon.
People seem to be more helpful to strangers in smaller communities, where there are fewer other people who could render aid, and where the consequences are perhaps more dire.
In a big city, meh, there's always someone else who could do it.
What is everyone's responsibility is no-one's responsibility. There are psychology experiements that back that up. Google 'the smoky room experiment' and 'bystander effect'.
> He explained that he would stay with me until the medics arrived and that he would call ahead to make sure one of the doctors on duty would "take good care of me."
Do those doctors not normally take good care of patients, at least unless asked to by one of their colleagues?
Another one just came to me, as I witnessed it yesterday on the train. A homeless man was walking down the train aisle, shaking a handful of coins and asking people for change in a long drawn out plead.
Everyone stared deeper into their phones until he went away, but when he came back a woman with a child handed him some change and he walked on without thanking her.
The kid asked "why did you give him money mummy?" and her response was simply "you see homeless, you give money" and that was the end of it. I just liked the implicit matter-of-fact decency in which she lived her life.
I've got lots of travel stories, not of which are as impressive as most of the other stories here, because I was never in a situation where I needed help but I have definitely experienced strangers where I'm a foreigner in their country just randomly deciding they're going to be nice to me. Nothing earth shattering, but definitely things that were the highlight of that particular trip.
The most recent one was walking through an "ancient village" in China, looking around at all the cool houses and poking my head into the obviously shop ones. There was one shop (I think, I never did actually find out!) with a load of traditional instruments that you could see through the open front door and someone playing to the side of the door. I poked my head in, and they stopped playing as they were too embarrassed to play for an audience, but I had a bit of a chat with her in Chinese about the instrument - it was a guqin, and similar concept to the guzheng I'd had a couple of hours of lessons on as part of my language classes back home. (The difference is that guqin is more like a 7 string violin without frets, a guzheng is 21 strings each a different note). About a minute later, a guy popped in and explained that the woman was shy playing in front of others, and when she told him that I'd mentioned the other instrument, he sat down and said "I'll teach you to play!". Which he did for about 10 minutes and then said, "Follow me, pipe, pipe, pipe!" He then took me down a small street and into a different shop that turned out to be a school for bamboo flutes (called xiao), which are like reedless descant recorders, so you have to make the base sound with your lips. Despite knowing the fingering from learning the recorder as a kid, I only managed to produce a note about 20 or 30 times from 100+ attempts, but they were impressed anyway. He sat me down to drink tea, and brought it all the other students and teachers and just had an impromptu tea party. Despite being in a bit of a hurry by then as I needed to catch the bus back to where I was staying before they stopped running about 10pm, I ended up being there for about 3-4 hours. They were probably going to just be hanging around their studio anyway, and the cost of the tea they used was probably a dollar at most, but it was a unique experience for me to see something that probably the other thousand people who visited that day would walk past and didn't even know existed! Plus I got to practice my language skills in a completely different way than I'd done before.
One act of kindness from me in my early 20s, when I had a year travelling around Australia, was offering to buy a meal for a homeless guy begging outside McDonalds. It seemed such a simple thing, but it was clearly very transformative for him. Obviously, he would get some money each day from people throwing coins into his hat, but he said that about 90% of people walked past him and completely ignored him, and even the people that donated usually didn't even make eye contact. He told me it was the first real conversation he'd had with someone for about 5 years and for just a few dollars and 10 minutes of my time, I was able to make him feel that someone did actually see him as a real human being with his own story to tell. It definitely shaped me as a person too, because I saw how something so simple and easy for me made such a big difference to him.
old guy gave all his money and energy to start a school to keep civilization from going bonkers. i never knew him and he never knew me but we still are related.
I think the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for me was holding a door open or something similarly mundane. I don't have any other really nice or profound memories. Then again I have not gotten into any similarly bad accident as the OP (knock on wood)
I was in a car accident once, many years ago... nothing terrible but I was in shock (it was my first car accident) and in mild pain (bruises from the airbag and a headacke mostly). The other party came over and asked me if I had a phone. I was still in my car, trying to realize what happened. When I said that yes, I have a phone he said "then better call the police. the accident was your fault" (which for all I know was probably true), then he left to sit on the roadside and smoke a cigarette and scroll on his smartphone until the police and ambulance arrived, 15 minutes later. Because of him, they came with 4 or 5 extra vehicles, simply because I couldn't really answer their questions well ("how many people are in the other car? is anyone injuered besides you? are the cars still driveable or do they need to be towed?" all quesions I couldn't answer)
I overheard that he got a lecture from one of the cops later on, but still it was an experience that I don't want to make again anytime soon
A friend of mine and I (we are both Aussies) had been staying at my Grandma's house in a rural village in UK and were trying to make our way back to London on Boxing Day. The fact that it was Boxing Day meant that no buses were running, so we started sticking our thumbs out to try and hitch a lift to the nearest town's train station. As you would expect, picking up two 19 year old blokes in the middle of nowhere was not an attractive proposition to your average passerby.
Eventually a guy comes along and picks us up. Tells us he hitched all the way across Europe back in the day so he empathized with us. Says he's on the way to pick up his son (our age) from work, a department store that happened to be on the way to the station.
His son gets into the car, understandably pretty bemused as to why his dad has brought two random stragglers with him!
We get to the station only to find that it's closed, because, yes, it's Boxing Day and trains weren't running either (we hadn't really thought this through). Guy says:
"Don't worry lads, all the family are around ours for Christmas dinner. My brother lives in West London so he can give you a ride there at the end of the night."
So we found ourselves, two foreign students, invited to a complete stranger's Christmas dinner party. We all had so much fun and drank so much that we completely abandoned the London idea and went back to my Grandma's at the end of the night.
And the kid who was our age that got picked up from work? He ended up being my Best Man when I got married 15 years later. True story!
This kind of reminds me of my brother's first trip to Taiwan.
This was in the 1980s. (Before cellphones.) The guy who was supposed to pick him up didn't show up because his motorcycle broke down. And couldn't get it fixed because it was Chinese New Year.
My brother arrived, not speaking any Chinese, surrounded by people who didn't speak any English. Who were having the biggest party that my brother had ever seen, and kept giving him food and inviting him places! He had absolutely NO idea what was going on!
After a few days of this, the person who was supposed to meet him finally managed to arrive, and my brother was hooked. Spent most of the next two decades in Taiwan.
Wonderful story!
As a Brit, I feel Xmas meal is the one time when you might see new faces around the table as we make an effort to ensure nobody is eating alone.
Growing up it was not unusual for members of the local community to join us if they faced Xmas alone.
Wild how life sometimes compresses decades into a single afternoon
does couchsurfing count? in poland trains are running on christmas, but i missed a connection and i was stuck in warsaw on chistmas eve. looked up hosts on couchsurfing which take guests without prior notice and found myself enjoying christmas dinner with a polish family.
After a concert in London, I missed the last train back to Lancaster. So I made a sign saying that I was on CouchSurfing, and some strangers invited me over!
After CouchSurfing started charging a monthly fee, I’ve defected to BeWelcome.org which is a European, open-source alternative to CS.
That's absolutely amazing.
I've got a weird one from a bank.
I was driving from South Carolina to Virginia, I was completely broke, and had exactly $20 in cash, and only a couple dollars in my checking account. I did my math wrong, and didn't have enough money for enough gas to make it home. I was trying to draft behind semi trucks and drive slow to conserve fuel, but it wasn't enough.
I called my bank at the gas station with my needle on empty and asked what would happen if I overdrew my account by $50, and the guy on the phone asked me to explain the situation. Afterwards he said I was good to go.
I asked, what does that mean? He said there's now $50 in your account. You can use it to fill up your car on your debit card.
I filled up my car and made it home. When I checked my account later, expecting to see an overdraft fee, there was a deposit of $50 from some account I didn't recognize. The guy had just transferred me $50 from his own account. I never figured out who this was, so ~18 years later, I'll take this opportunity to say: thank you sir.
I don't know that this is THE nicest thing anyone has ever done, but it was a small thing that made a huge difference in that moment.
I have a similar story. I was probably 22 and my car was in the shop, which was across town. When I got the call that it was ready, it was only an hour before the shop closed but I figured I could walk the distance in that time. After a while it became clear I wasn't going to make it, even running (which I had been doing for a bit). Exhausted and with only 5 minutes before the shop closed, I asked a guy at a gas station if he could give me a ride. He said sure, got me to the shop no problem and even refused money I tried to give him for his time and gas.
Looking back, it probably wasn't that big a deal for the guy. He only had to drive me a handful of blocks, so it's not like it was way out of his way or cost him more than a couple dollars in gas. But at the time, it felt like he saved my life. I was able to get my car back and get to work that night, and all was well. It's amazing how big of a difference a small kindness can make.
I was at a gas station once and someone approached me with a sad story about needing to get somewhere (I don't recall the details) and he was broke, could I give him some money for gas. This is a common scam but he seemed genuine and I was in a good mood. I said I did not have any cash but I would buy him a tank of gas, which I did. Then I went back to fill my own car, and the pump never charged me. I swiped my card, filled the tank, but the charge never appeared on my credit card.
I wonder if the second tank of gas at the same gas station triggered fraud detection, and your card company handled it without asking.
Possibly. It was quite a number of years ago.
About 10 years ago I was regularly withdrawing small sums of money every month, looking a bit poor, with old clothes, sometimes a bit torn or dirty. The bank teller just offered to give me a pair of winter shoes. I felt uncomfortable so I didn't take them, but thanked him anyway. I could've used them, but I think he probably offered them to someone else later on who needed them more than I did.
I didn't have any prior relationship with him, except going to him to give him my ID so I can get the money a few times.
I worked at a YMCA as a young man, and I once bought a pair of shoes for a kid who was embarrassed of theirs.
It didn't go as well as I thought it would--her mom was embarrassed and then out-did me--but it still felt really good to give them.
So for anyone reading, it can feel as good to give a kindness as to receive one. Don't shy!
> it can feel as good to give a kindness as to receive one
True - I love giving gifts and helping people more than receiving them or getting help. But it's still awkward/uncomfortable to receive help.
> her mom was embarrassed and then out-did me
Out-did you how? Did she buy better shoes for the kid? Or did she give you a gift?
Yeah, she took the kid and let her pick out her favorite pair.
I had picked for her, and I'm not a girl. I think the new ones had lights.
I will say the kid cried happy tears and thanked me and beamed all day long the first day. She was 8.
You did great.
Kindness doesn't have to be dramatic to be life-saving in the moment
Indeed.
Ah yes, I kind of grew up with the expectations bank people are supposed to always rip you of, so they cannot really be kind, only pretend nice to get money from you. So when I was a poor backpacker in australia wanting to cash in the small check from fruit picking work, I was suprised to find out, that there were normaly quite some fees involved to get the cash, but the bank person just smiled and said, it is ok in my case and I got all the cash with no fees.
It's really striking the number times people have downvoted my story, considering it is 1) a true fact about my life, and 2) eminently relevant to the topic of the article.
Even a thread about kindness can't stop the haters :)
Honestly, I suspect HN is starting to fuzz votes the way Reddit does. Some of the voting I've seen on my own comments lately makes zero sense, including weeks-old comments of perfectly neutral tone. It isn't worth worrying about.
Don't discount better and better "I can't believe it's not human" aping behaviour of personal bot armies of HN accounts - there's clear and obvious spam green accounts, and a steady drip of bland comment, weird voting behaviour, biege textual tone accounts that evolve through green and into background noise.
The admins potter about classifying coarse behaviour and looking to reject spam, voting blocs, overly weird AI comments, etc. The creators make their bot accounts less obvious with random votes, etc.
what's green mean, new?
Comments made by recent accounts appear with green names until a grace period passes.
HN prefers "legit accounts" (subjective) - good faith comments from real people, reasonable uses of alias and spun up fresh accounts for regulars to say things without being part of their main history, etc. New commenters welcome.
There are obvious and less obvious dark patterns of bad faith account creation.
The admins do a pretty decent job, sweeping cobwebs without hitting real genuine people is an artform ...
Returning to the main GP point - there's a lot of low key background churn activity that can result in "inexplicatable" votes, some from bots and some from the general case of "people are strange".
>Comments made by recent accounts appear with green names until a grace period passes.
on HN? huh, i've never seen that (and i'm no spring chicken)
If you see my message quickly enough (I can't remember how long the green lasts, so not sure when the deadline is for this example), here's the most recent green I saw to give you an example: jonathan7977, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46264260 (linked directly to their comment but it shows green on the main thread also - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46263317)
I see them every day.
A lot of them I only see because I have "showdead" turned on.
I’m pretty sure that after 24 hours, comments cannot be down-voted (only upvoted).
I don't know if it even needs to be intentional. On mobile, it's incredibly easy to downvote when you mean to upvote.
Yeah, every time I upvoter on mobile I need to look at the header to make sure it doesn't say u down, and then fix it if it does.
Literally welling up at this. Thanks for sharing.
5th grade, my best friend at the time was in a basketball team, just a small town league for kids. I never really played basketball, so I was planning to watch the game then we'd hang out. It was the first game of the season and my friend was getting his uniform from a table when a dad running things asked me what team I was playing on and I said no, I'm just here to hang out with my friend.
He shook his head and said, "No, that won't do. You're on his team, too" and handed me a jersey. Then he went ahead and paid my registration fee.
More than the money, it was the proactive nature of it that struck me at the time. The thing is, if I had asked my parents they probably would have signed me up. But it was one of those things where it would have never crossed my mind to ask. I ws as one of those kids that needed a push every now and then and rarely got one.
I never got very good at basketball but I never missed a game and had a great time with my friend. So not a tragic or desperate story, but still meaningful to me all these years later.
There is a million ways where that interaction goes sideways and becomes a drama between the parents nowadays.
It's the kids that seem to appreciate it more than the parents, funnily enough.
I agree with the replies to this saying that the fact it could lead to drama should not prevent people doing things like this, but I can see this causing trouble/resentment too.
I think a lot of the other unasked for examples given could also cause resentment. Perhaps often the right thing to do is just taking the risk.
Things have always been able to go wrong. That's not a reason to stop doing things. Oh no, you might get an ear full from an angry parent once in a while. boo hoo.
It's a bit dark, but I'm doing much better now, so happy ending. No need to wish me well or anything, I'm the happiest I've ever been (thankfully).
After reaching an age where bi-polar disorder goes full swing, I was unable to manage manic episodes; they'd spring up and I'd be awake for days and then crash horribly. I lost all hope that I'd be able to hold down a typical job ever again. I became a 24h/7d alcoholic with the goal of never being conscious and trying to sleep through life until it ended.
I was at the local shop where I bought my booze buying a bunch of beer and vodka around 7-8am. A guy near me at the counter made a comment about what a great party must be coming. I looked at him, probably dead-eyed, and said, "I'm an alcoholic."
He put his hand on my shoulder. He didn't say anything. It was just a moment of compassion. It was deeply kind. What was communicated was simply that someone cared and, to this day, I wish I had a way to thank him for that profound gesture.
I live in Minnesota and do not own a snowblower. Probably my mistake, but I always joke that I get most of my exercise in the winter. Snow is really heavy for those without context.
A couple years ago we had a particularly bad snowfall. The plow has a nasty hate filled habit of dumping all its snow in my driveway. I had a drift at the end of my driveway about 4 feet high and 6 feet deep. Literally up to my chest. I had spent a solid hour just chipping away at it trying to get my car out and had made very little progress.
Right as I was about to give up in frustration, a man in a bobcat drove by. Moments later he turned around, came back, and asked "would you like me to clear that for you?" I told him that would be amazing. Took him a couple minutes and then he waved and drove off before I got a chance to offer him any money or even thank him.
I think about this guy pretty often, it's absolutely the random act of kindness in my life I have appreciated most.
A recent lesser snowfall for context:
https://imgur.com/a/1un20s7
Just be wary as you get older. The number of old men who die from heart attacks while shoveling snow is nonzero
The number of old men who die from doing no exercize is also quite high.
My grandfather was a farmer and scarcely went a day without hours of exercise in his life. He passed away after a heart attack while shoveling his paraplegic neighbor's driveway.
You don't have to be unfit to get done in by shoveling snow.
It doesn't snow much where I live. Why is shovelling snow so deadly? Don't people stop for a rest when they get tired?
The heart attack danger is a perfect storm of two factors that do not normally occur together:
1) Extreme physical exertion - sudden, intense arm-heavy exercise often as a Valsalva maneuver (straining and holding the breath). This dramatically increases blood pressure, which puts acute stress on the heart and arteries.
2) Exposure to cold air exacerbating the strain on the heart with vasoconstriction (blood vessel constriction). Cold temperatures cause peripheral blood vessels (arteries and veins) to narrow. This forces the heart to work harder to pump blood through the constricted vessels to keep the body warm, leading to an increase in blood pressure. The combination of constricted vessels and high physical exertion means the heart needs significantly more oxygen to function, but the cold and high pressure can limit the blood and oxygen flow (myocardial oxygen demand is increased). Breathing cold air can also trigger constriction in the coronary arteries that supply the heart muscle itself, further increasing the risk of reduced blood flow and a heart attack.
I remember a friend who was really into his skiing telling me that ski instructors take bets on which overweight 50+ year old first time skiing city person would have the a heart attack first.
Snow can be very heavy depending on the water content. So sometimes it's really light and basically effortless to shovel, but sometimes each shovel full of snow is 10-20 pounds of weight that you have to throw over and over. That gets taxing very quickly, plus people don't generally warm up before doing this intense exercise.
It's not like shoveling snow is super dangerous. Most people don't die from shoveling the snow. But it can happen and it's worth slowing down and taking breaks.
Physically it is very taxing. Snow is heavy, and the movements aren’t typical of daily activity. Even for a modestly sized property it can take awhile.
I think it’s a combination of incredible weight, lots of aerobic activity, and the cold which masks some of the fatigue that might tell you to take a break. I am over 40, and over an inch or two just pay someone to deal with the snow.
The fix for never exercising isn’t to blow the buildup into your heart all at once…………….
My ninth grade English teacher never made it back from Christmas break because of this.
Isn't "number of old men who die from heart attacks while doing anything is non zero"?
It’s the going from zero to 100 that gets folks it seems.
Deep, heavy, wet snow is called heart attack snow for a reason. It sneaks up on you - a driveway you just cleared for years with normal snowfalls is all of a sudden a 10x workout from usual, and your brain doesn’t completely process this. Anything else at that level of intensity would likely trigger you to take breaks.
That said - I think inactivity is far worse. But I still make a point to go shovel my elderly neighbors walks here in Chicago before they have a chance to do it when we get particularly deep snowfalls.
In the cold. The exercise-plus-hypothermia combo is a bad one. Pick one, not both.[1]
[1] https://shine365.marshfieldclinic.org/heart-care/prevent-hyp...
Shoveling snow is a well-established high risk factor for older adults.
For fat people, getting over heated when doing things is generally the limiting factor on how strenuous one can push the body. In the cold you can exercise a lot harder before you get too hot, so the person can stress the body more than they usually would.
>Snow is really heavy
after a nar nar day in pow pow cuttin freshies up to your nippy nips, you'll change that assessment!
(my email address was once inadvertently put on a mailing list for the planning of a bachelor party ski weekend, people I did not know or have any connection to, and that's the way they talked. i enjoyed it so much i didn't confess till they demanded to know why i hadn't RSVPed yet)
> after a nar nar day in pow pow cuttin freshies up to your nippy nips
Translation, please?
nar nar = from gnarly meant in the sense of "great"
pow pow = is powder, powdery snow
cuttin = skiing (i.e. leaving a trail behind you after cutting through the snow)
freshies = means fresh, new; not clear in this context, it could refer to "fresh snow" or "fresh tracks"
nippy nips = depth of snow is up to your nips (nipples) and you are cold/excited/goosebumps so your nips are nippy
this is generalized "california surfer talk"; the type of western man who surfs also snowboards, dirt bikes, jet skis, etc as well as clings to a teenaged hangout burnout lifestyle
I'm convinced bobcats (used generically) are the single most versatile and useful platform ever created. They're fun to drive and you can solve most problems with them. Not optimally for any specific task, but if something needs to be pushed or lifted or moved or pulled or flattened or piled, you can find a way.
An 863 with hi-flow 2 speed and a pivoting plow was the most ideal snowplow I've ever played with.
You’d likely be interested in the history of the Bobcat (tm)
https://youtu.be/bfgEr-nPCv8?si=Q8dbWlLZcdyU2enj
If you shovel the curb on your street “up stream” from the plowing direction, it provides a place for the plow stream to go and significantly reduces the amount of soon-to-be rock hard snow you’ll have to clear from your driveway.
Plot twist: He just wanted an excuse to try out his new snowblower.
Yep this is me. I get super pumped whenever we get a snowfall large enough to justify pulling out my ridiculously overkill snowblower.
The entire block on both sides plus the alley gets done those days. Neighbors here at first were skeptical since I guess it’s not normal (it is in Minnesota - every block there has a hero) for the big city, but now I get treats from various houses that catch me doing it.
I honestly do it for the pure joy of using awesome equipment I could otherwise nowhere remotely justify purchasing. Plus knowing I’m helping out my community in a small way is a nice bonus. Also helps me meet people and be social as an introvert.
There’s more of this than you might expect. First time I got to turn on my new Toro I went the entire way around the block.
The other side of the equation is my now dead toro had me covered in gas, frozen fingers, and plenty of swearing, with an itching desire to light it ablaze in the middle of the yard.
Tis the cycle of snow blower ownership.
I have a firm suspicion that blowers last a number of seasons, not a number of runtime hours.
That’s just an excuse to upgrade to the new hotness!
Plausible. When I got a new trailer for my bike that could haul 300 lbs I just wanted to find someone who needed a sofa moved for free.
can you blame him? guy has a Bobcat!
I wish I could see the photo but I live in the UK…
Don’t worry, both you and especially your children are safe from seeing the picture of the snowdrift.
LOL
https://rimgo.vern.cc/a/1un20s7
Thanks
prob time to get a snowblower
My best friend, his girlfriend, brother, sister and I piled into a minivan in July of 2018 and drove from Boston to SF. Best friend and I both took jobs there out of school and decided to make a trip of the life move.
We painted BOS > SF on the back window. At a gas station in Memphis a random guy walked up to us and said "Make sure you go to Graceland. Can't miss it."
We sort of smile and nod politely and then walk into the gas station to use the bathroom, reload on snacks etc.
10 mins later we come back outside and the same guy comes over "I bought you all tickets to Graceland, who can I text them to?"
Truly such a sick moment. Graceland was a highlight of the trip and to have someone just do such a random kind thing made it that much better. Long live Elvis, long live the King. Thanks again to whoever you are that did that. Respect.
Was he an older guy with a curl in his upper lip?
Saw the ghost of Elvis on Union Avenue,
Followed him up to the gates of Graceland, and I watched him pass right through.
he was definitely alive
Was he a soulful bearded guy?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgRafRp-P-o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ac-00KY_XGM
I saw my mom do something as a child that really stuck with me. This was back in the 70s cause I’m old. It was summer in the Midwest we were in the car in a store parking lot gettin ready to leave. An African-American lady pulled into a spot beside our car. In front of her was a pickup truck with two men and a pregnant woman. They started accosting the lady telling her she had bumped their vehicle and now the pregnant woman was in pain. This was the 70s so everyone’s windows were down so we heard the whole thing. The gist was these people were clearly trying to extort money from this lady. My mom got out and dressed them down because she had been watching and the ladies car didn’t touch their truck. They sulked and drove away. The lady was very afraid and very grateful. This was a time and place where not a lot of African Americans lived. That really stuck with me over the years.
Back in the 60s, my mom befriended a black lady at work. I believe this was in Texas, so a couple of her (white, male) superiors approached her and tried to impress upon her that this was something that Just Wasn't Done 'Round These Parts. It didn't take, and she and the other lady continued to go out for drinks after work.
Your mom was especially courageous to do this as a child!
People are having kids earlier and earlier these days.
LoL
About a decade ago I walked El Camino de Santiago. On the very last day I had to catch a bus from Santiago de Compostela to the local airport to get on the flight to Madrid and head back home. I remember standing with my backpack on some random street at 6AM not really knowing where the hell the bus stop is. A woman walked up to me and asked me something. I could see she seemed frustrated and couldn't really understand what she was saying. Then started telling her in my very non-existent Spanish that I'm trying to get to the airport. She immediately grabbed my hand and just dragged me through all of the traffic straight to the bus stop a couple of block away ignoring all traffic lights. Then showed me on her fingers how many minutes the bus will arrive and walked away. Forever grateful to this woman for helping me not miss my flight home. I've had a number of similar encounters with strangers while on this trail. Spaniards really appreciate anyone dedicating their time to be on the trail and a lot of them go out of their way to accommodate people either with a free stay, food, a ride to a grocery store and etc.
I was driving to my first “real” tech job about 500 miles away from home at the age of 18. All my assets in my beater of a car, and about $120 in my bank account at the time.
My car broke down at a rest stop due to overheating and would not start again. I called a local shop on a Sunday afternoon and some guy in a tow truck pulled up and brought me to his place.
He knew immediately it was some fuel control module that dies when overheated, and just so happened to have a car he was working on to resale with the same one. I truthfully told him I probably couldn’t afford to pay him for it until I got my first paycheck and he asked how much I had. Told him about $120 to my name and he just charged me $100 and said I was good to go.
I (barely) made it to my new spot at 4am or so going 35mph to keep from overheating again. Flashers on the whole way there. Used my change jar to pay for my final tank of gas.
I didn’t fully realize how much that repair should have cost - plus the tow - plus the same day off hours service.
I think about that guy a lot and it’s informed my charitable giving ever since. I like to think I’m still paying it forward to this day when situations arise for me to help out someone in need who isn’t asking for a favor first.
Given the response I got from family when I called them to ask for a $100 loan to pay for gas on that trip informed my relationships with them for life. A stranger went out of his way more than supposedly close family did during my most dire (at the time) emergency I had ever experienced.
We had driven to a small remote village on Vancouver Island BC, to catch an early morning ferry. We had reserved a room at the only motel in town. We got there around 9PM. The a*h** owner ignored the doorbell and did not let us in (we could see him moving around in his attached residence). We went to a restaurant that was just about closing, told our story, and asked the owners if there were any options. Their friend, who was hanging around there overheard us .. he invited us to come over to his house and spend the night. The next day he insisted on buying us a wonderful breakfast.
When we got back home after the long trip, we sent him a nice sweatshirt with "New Jersey" on it.
My chain had slipped off the rear sprocket, wedged itself between the gear and the frame. I forgot my toolkit and I was unable to free it. I was miles out of town so a walk back was going to take hours. A guy on a motorcycle rode by, looked at me and turned around. He got off his bike, got his tools, and freed the chain in seconds. I was profoundly grateful. Years later, I happened across a cyclist in a similar situation. I helped him and I told him I was simply paying back the first guy who had helped me. It felt really good.
I'm something of a cyclist and I drive on a lot of roads where there are cyclists all the time. I keep meaning to make sure my car is stocked with some helpful bike tools or a spare tube or something. I need to get on that.
Same. I'm tempted to throw in a couple of spare tubes in the little pocket things between the interior trim and tail lights, where just now I keep a spare fanbelt, too.
I usually have stick-on patches and a bike pump as well as the normal Landrover-fixing tools, because you can have a toolbox without having an old Landrover but you can't have an old Landrover without having a toolbox.
A few tubes, CO2 or a pump and some tyre levers.
You’ll be a super hero.
Aren't there many different kinds of tubes? Or are they fairly standard?
Road bikes are reasonably standard. Tubes will generally fit some range of tyre sizes so in practice a single size will fit most road bikes.
Interesting, thanks!
You might want to have tubes with both Presta and Schrader valves (to match the existing tube on the other tire). Theoretically you could use either, but some rims might have a hole that's only small enough for a Presta valve (so I guess that makes Presta slightly more compatible in an emergency!).
I agree that there's flexibility in the sizes. When I wanted to stock up my work's garage with spare bike tires, I got four kinds in total (basically a small Presta, a small Schrader, a large Presta, and a large Schrader). This officially covered pretty much every common road and hybrid or mountain bike with something that was officially rated or matched to it. But yes, as far as I know, one could probably get by in practice with fewer than that and use things that are officially slightly mismatched.
Specifically, I got the Specialized "Standard Schrader" 700x20-28c and 700x28-38c, and "Standard Presta" 700x20-28c and 700x28-38c tubes (the smaller ones more likely for road bikes, the larger ones more likely for mountain bikes). These are about $8 each in the U.S., so a total of about $32 for the set of four. 700c is increasingly common, although there are several other diameters that have been or are being used.
Just having a bike pump can be pretty helpful in many circumstances!
Lately, many Presta tubes come with valve nuts that fit Schrader valve holes. The nuts look similar to this: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/612j5EAmLXL._AC_UF1000,1...
So there's not necessarily a need to carry tubes with both valve types.
Oh, I think I've seen one of those! Cool, that could definitely help for emergencies.
"Paying it back" instead of "paying it forward" feels especially right here
I find that cyclists often help cyclists. ‘Help the next guy’ being a phrase I’ve heard a few times.
A $5 tube is so small a cost. Not having one can make a minor inconvenience into an utter shambles if you have to call home go a lift from 50km away at 6am.
You know what else is a nice thing to carry? A wad of paper towels to get the grease off. Even if someone can repair their own bike, they often don't have a plan for the grease.
I've handed out paper towels to 4-5 people this year and they were all delighted.
That’s a good idea.
Less practical: the group I ride with did a 200km ride, with one member having a nice shiny case attached to his bike where the pump might go.
When they finished he smoked his cigar.
And alcohol wipes. Just the other day someone stopped to give me alcohol wipes after I put my chain back on. The alcohol cleans off the grease completely, unlike paper towels. I'm carrying a pack in my car now.
I’ve started waxing my chain rather than oiling it.
It’s a hassle, but doing 2 at a time means the admin is much reduced.
There is a huge amount less dirt and grease in my life now. Even when I change it to re-wax it I don’t get dirty. I probably get 2-3 weeks, 500-600km out of each waxing.
Interesting. My usual approach at home is actually to put a few drops of cooking oil on my hands, which dissolves the grease; regular soap can then remove the oil.
I already have some alcohol wipes in my bag as part of an emergency medical kit. I'll add a few more for grease emergencies. :-)
One summer I got a ridiculous number of flat tires in my 300,000 mile jeep.
One of those happened in a heavy rainstorm. The ground was soft, and I don't know why exactly, but I couldn't get the jack to lift the jeep high enough to lift the tire.
I was on a country highway near my home, with no cell service and maybe one car every ten minutes. I tried a few spots, even just halfway in the lane--I was afraid, though, because the rain limited visibility for other drivers.
A man pulled up behind me in a Subaru. He wasn't local; he had come from Tennessee to paint a local scenic spot. He not only lent me his jack, but he got out in the pouring rain and helped until it was done. We both had raincoats, at least.
He said that just the day before, he had a flat of his own, and someone stopped and helped him solve some problem he couldn't get around, too.
I doubt that's the nicest thing a stranger ever did for me, but I sure appreciated it. Stopping and helping may be a small kindness, but it can feel like a miracle to the recipient.
Growing up as a child whenever the family drove somewhere, if my dad saw someone with car trouble he would stop.
It helped that he was a real engineer and an excellent mechanic, but I think there was also a Christian duty in there as well for him.
Parker's Automotive is a pretty cool youtube channel, guy goes around in his truck and mostly does work for free. Seems like every day he's finding someone stopped in a lane.
I think he's been able to parlay it into an awesome youtube career, and the amount of people who stop on the street to sing his praises is unreal. Sometimes 15+ in one video, it's nuts. He's a hero to the people. Love to see it.
I try to stop when I can, and occasionally pick up a hitchhiker, but I don't risk it when I have kids in the car.
I like this. I hope this thread fills with many more comments.
I think it's important to remember especially in traffic and such that cars aren't cars, they are people. I have no idea the real ratios, but imagine 20% are genuinely good people, 60% are just going about their lives, and 20% are miserable for some reason and drive like miserable people. It's easy to think everyone else is an idiot and become aggressive, but remember it's a small percentage who actually agitate you.
Now to answer the question. I guess it's when I was a kid, I'd completely torn my ACL but they wouldn't operate until I was done growing. I don't know how old, 12 maybe? I was in Washington DC running across a busy street when my knee slid out of place and I fell in the road. A Mercedes stopped, purposely blocking both lanes of traffic, and a husky middle aged black lady in scrubs got out and dragged me out of the road onto the sidewalk. She asked if I was ok, and I was as it happened here and there, and off she went. It was such a kind gesture in a city that seemed so cold and always on the go.
> I have no idea the real ratios, but imagine 20% are genuinely good people, 60% are just going about their lives, and 20% are miserable for some reason and drive like miserable people.
Lately, this is my experience in general, not only cars. Though I want to say both that 20% and 60% are genuinely good, and that first 20% are readily above-and-beyond.
In the big-name college town where I live, which still pretends to be warm-fuzzy (the remaining hippies are silver-haired), eventually you pick up on a pervasive undercurrent of selfishness.
A lot of people only get into the prestigious places because they look out for their own interests, and being here is only temporary and transactional.
And a lot of people are strained by the high cost of living for lousy conditions, and are just trying to get by.
Still, I've seen, for example, delirious (opioids?) street people slump off a bench on the gritty main drag, and quickly be surrounded concerned and helpful passersby who looked like yuppies. (And the only phones out were multiple people calling 911, no social media content creation, just genuinely helping and then disappearing.)
I believe the same: everyone wants to be in New York / Munich / pick your local fashionable place. Everyone moves there to be someone. But not everyone can be someone, so there are a lot of unhappy / selfish people.
That's very different from what I was thinking.
Most people have to be a bit selfish, to acquire greater money/power/status than others. You usually don't come in first in the race, by pausing to help another runner who fell.
A lot of the people just trying to get by, on the other hand, have it harder because of the externalities of someone else's selfishness and sometimes cheating.
But, people just barely getting by can go one of two ways: they may or may not decide to help another person who falls.
Some just getting by will think we're all in this together, and we help each other, no matter what the jerks do. I think this is actually pretty popular philosophy, and is my own thinking.
But other just getting by might think they can't afford to help others, or that it's every person for themself. That philosophy happens, too, and is unfortunate, and it can be contagious. But much of the helping-others group is resilient.
Since you mentioned NYC: A very minor anecdote, but once, when I day-tripped to NYC for a startup interview, I just missed the last train home to Boston. I went to the booth where I saw an employee, and asked them what do I do. Her initial reaction was gruff indifferent dismissal, like is a stereotype of people in NYC. (A stereotype being something like, you can't care, because there is so much misery and crazy around you, and other people's problems are just too much to deal with besides your own.) But I think she picked up on my implicit Pollyanna belief that she would help me, because, an instant later, her whole tone changed, and she projected warmth and caring, and told me how to get home on a bus. (The startup was offering me the position, but I declined, because I decided NYC was too rough for me at the time, the nice lady in the train station notwithstanding.)
My family lived in an apartment near a cemetery when I was 10, the complex stretched along the old cemetery wall made out of massive granite stones. Nearly all of the people living in the complex were elderly.
When I came home from school I would sometimes kick ball against the wall and I could spot old people looking at me from the windows, they would stare at me for a long time.
One summer an elderly woman came out on the balcony and invited me to come up for ice cream, my parents had warned me to beware of friendly strangers but my judgement at the time was that it was a neighbor so they must be friendly.
I entered and to my surprise the woman wasn't alone, she lived with her husband who was sitting in an armchair and they both looked to be in their 80s. They seemed very happy to have me, we sat down on the balcony and I remember feeling a bit awkward as these two strangers looked and smiled at me as I was eating the ice cream.
I don't think they ever had any children.
This memory sometimes resurfaces, and now at 41 I realize how sad and wonderful this was at the same time.
We moved away shortly after and I never saw them again.
I was at a waterpark as a young teen and ended up trying the wave pool, but even being tall for my age I was shorter than a typical adult. When I first went out the waves weren't turned on/going yet, but once the waves started everyone moved forward and the crowded pool compressed even more, plus I got pushed even deeper into the deep end, and basically I sank down because I couldn't really get any space to swim and everyone else was standing. It was so packed with people that eventually (without my realizing at the time) it became impossible to move arms and legs enough to stay up, kinda like a crowd surge but in the water.
I must have been too shy to think of climbing onto the person next to me. My best guess is that I was "jumping" up off the bottom to get brief bits of air while hoping it wasn't in the middle of a wave. After doing this for a bit, could be just seconds, I started to panic (I really couldn't tell you how long, felt like forever). I heard a whistle and somehow this lifeguard was there through the crowd within seconds (they had been standing along the wall of the pool but I was more in the middle).
The people all around me shoulder to shoulder hadn't even noticed what was going on, I still feel amazed the lifeguard could pick me out from thousands of heads and get to me.
(I don't know if this can be considered "nice" cause it was their job, but it's something that has always stuck with me).
I was a lifeguard for about 8 years in high school and college. I pulled out close to 20 people. Never had to administer CPR: if you get there quick enough it’s maybe a bit of coughing.
I wonder if any of those people remember that.
I also cannot sit by a body of water with people swimming without falling back into lifeguard mode. I’ve pulled out a few people as a civilian. Nothing serious, but it would have been. Little kids and beaches are a rough combo.
That "bobbing in the water but not splashing or swimming" motion is what drowning looks like in real life.
See if you can spot the person in trouble before the lifeguard does in this video: https://youtu.be/4sFuULOY5ik
PSA for anyone near water: Drowning people can act the opposite of what one might expect. No flailing, no splashing, no yelling, just quietly disappearing. It’s good to know the real signs to watch for. [0]
[0] https://ndpa.org/drowningdoesntlooklikedrowning/
I planned to propose to my girlfriend at sunset on the coast. We walked along a path and I got out my camera, ostensibly so we could take photos of ourselves using a small tripod I brought. I was going to take a few photos using the camera remote, then propose and keep taking shots to capture the moment.
As I was setting up the tripod on a bench, and man who was walking by offered to take a photo for us. I didn't want to explain what was going to happen, so I declined. But he insisted that he had the exact same camera, and would be happy to take some photos.
I lowered my voice so my girlfriend wouldn't hear, and said "Ok don't react at all, but I am about to propose to my girlfriend." He nodded in understanding and calmly took the camera. He took a few posed shots and then gave me the signal. I got down on a knee and proposed (completely forgetting what the speech I had prepared, of course), with him taking photos all the while. I'm certain that the photos he took (in manual mode!) turned out much better than what I would have captured at sunset/dusk, via remote.
A year or two later I mentioned to my then-wife that it would have been nice had we invited the man to our wedding. She laughed and said that she always assumed he was a photographer whom I had paid to be at the location at that time. It took quite some convincing before she understood that he was just a Nikon photog who was in the right place at the right time.
I met a Tesla engineer on Reddit a few years ago. We got talking, he referred me to Tesla, and I ended up getting an offer for what was basically my dream role.
He was a complete stranger and incredibly kind, supportive, and helpful throughout the process. Still grateful for that. Small acts like that restore a bit of faith in humanity.
It also reminded me of a Steve Jobs quote:
“Most people never pick up the phone. Most people never ask. And that’s what separates, sometimes, the people who do things from the people who just dream about them. You have to act, and you have to be willing to fail. If you’re afraid of failing, you won’t get very far.” - SJ
A surprising number of people are even afraid of succeeding
I actually struggle with this quite a bit, took me a while to realised, but wonder if you have any advice to get over it? (Aside from just succeed more)
I'm struggling with this too. First, figure out if it's a true fear of success or really fear of failure in disguise. (I'm afraid of getting hired. So what? Then I have to perform. So what? But I might fail. Ahh, there we go.) Secondly, figure out what messages people around you gave you when you succeeded or failed. Especially any behaviors that gave you a feeling of fear, shame or disgust. Third, start placing your own judgment of what constitutes success or failure above what others think of as success or failure. Set your own goals and criteria for completion. Lastly, don't focus on the outcome, focus on your inputs. Work patiently, slow down until you reach the quality you want to reach.
Super actionable, will give these a go. Reading through this I now see that I get stuck on the first step and just beat myself out about it instead of making progress.
Thank you!
You're most welcome, glad you find it helpful. And yes, "Why are you hitting yourself?" is not just a movie trope but a pattern of behavior to break. Takes a while to hunt down old patterns like that but keep at it, you'll figure it out for sure. Seek and you shall find
Seems like something inherently too subjective to give useful blanket advice on.
Introspection is a powerful tool though, for me anyways.
So true. I had this 100% and starting my first startup helped me loads with it.
3-day bike trip, NYC to Provincetown. On day two, our group split up and I was riding with a close friend. 15 miles into the 100-mile day, we got our 3rd flat. We had only carried 2 spare tubes.
We had barely pulled our bikes onto the sidewalk when a woman in a sedan slowed down to ask if we needed help. We said yes and she quickly pulled over. We piled our bikes into her car, trunk open, and she drove us to the nearest bike shop.
Turns out her family member ran the shop.
Truly saved our day. We made it to Provincetown and 15 years later still remember her so fondly and are so thankful!
a couple of friends of mine from high school rode their bikes coast to coast together one summer. the more heavyset of the two (one was a stick) got 15x the number of flats.
just throwing it out there, the fact has never left me, tho, it's never come in handy either.
Carry a patch kit now?
Tubeless now - no flats in 5 years :)
I had finished my hamburger, zoning out. I had my guitar with me, having had a belowpar band practice, while waiting for my therapist appointment. Life was heading downwards in a slow, but steady, fashion.
This wonderful woman came over and asked if I wanted a hug. It warmed me to my bones. She said that "people should do that more", or something along those lines, and disappeared.
I don't remember her face, I just remember the warm feeling in my chest.
Oh man, I just love a good hug. So comforting.
It was snowing. I scraped the windshield of my car. When I was done, I turned the key - and the battery was dead. I shrugged, gathered my belongings and was about to go back into my apartment building. But a woman who has just arrived in her car came up to me. And she asked, “Is your car not starting? You can use mine if you like.” I had needed seen here before. I took it. I returned it with a full tank in the evening. I’ve since had two other random strangers lend me their car, both in Germany and in the US. It’s something I wouldn’t have believed people would do. And it’s something I wouldn’t have accepted out of fear. But I had learned: Being kind and accepting kindness are two sides of the same coin. The one cannot exists without the other.
I honestly would be scared shitless lending a stranger my car.
I wouldn't be comfortable borrowing someone's car, especially in the snow. If I were GP, I'd have driven it up next to my car, used the battery to jump mine, and thanked the stranger.
We got a new fridge a few years ago, throw the old one up online for free. It worked just fine, but it was one of those freezer-on-the-left and fridge-on-the-right, split down the middle. Tolerated it for years, and finally saved up enough for a new one.
So, someone comes to pick it up. Well, 3 someone’s. A older woman, a younger woman, and a younger man. The man was missing a decent amount of teeth and had a decent amount of prison ink.
The car they came in to pick up this enormous full size fridge was probably only slightly bigger than the fridge. It wasn’t even close to being possible to fit.
I looked over at my 25 year old truck (I love that truck more than any other vehicle I’ve had) and made a decision.
“Hey look man, I love this truck. You can borrow it to lug the fridge. Please bring it back. I’ll even level with you, if you don’t bring it back odds are I’m not even going to report it stolen, I’m just going to be bummed. I get notes on my windshield all the time asking if I’ll sell it.”
Guy kind of looks at me. The other two people glance at each other, and the whole thing felt very strange. So we load the fridge and off they go.
I looked at my wife and said “I’m never going to see that truck again, huh?”
After about 4 hours I gave up. They stole it. I was strangely ok with it. I made the decision, knowing the risks, and had accepted them.
3 hours after that, they brought my truck back. The guy gets out and kind of started sobbing. The older woman (I assume the mom) was crying. Guy gave me a huge hug. Everyone was incredibly emotional.
I didn’t ask, but can only assume they considered stealing it. I also assume they used it all day long based on the mileage.
What kind of truck you got?
That was a little nudge that proved to themselves that they can be better people.
I'd do it in a heartbeat in a situation like this, except that I have no idea what the insurance implications are.
Actually, maybe someone here knows: How much would I expose myself lending my ~$20k car with full coverage to a random idiot? For the sake of argument, say I'm reasonably assured they are legal to drive.
I looked into my policy once, and it said that if I let someone else drive my car, the coverage from my policy would revert to the state minimum, around $15k.
If the driver has insurance, that would probably get tapped first, but if they don't have enough it could end up hitting your policy.
YMMV, depends on state and your coverage.
When I looked into it for my situation, a one-off thing was fine. You'd get into trouble if you lent your car for an extended period of time or if it was something like you didn't tell the insurance company you had a spouse and they drove the car regularly.
Liability goes with the owner, not the driver. If you let someone drive your car, you are liable for any damage they do.
Not exactly -- legally speaking people are always primarily responsible for their own actions.
However, basically all insurance in the US extends coverage to people who the owner allows to drive the car.
But if you borrow someones car and you cause damages that go beyond their insurance limits, you can be personally sued for the remainder because you are still liable for your actions as a driver.
There are some exceptions where the owner can also be held liable for damages that someone else does, especially when they do it recklessly (e.g. lending to a drunk driver)
Traveling around India I ate some food at a train station before boarding an overnight train and became extremely sick. I arrived early into Bikaner and as I started wandering around I became more and more delirious, to the point that I don't have clear memories of what happened after for a day or so. A (not well off) family however found me, brought me to their home, put me up in a rooftop sort of room, called a doctor, and then fed and took care of me for the next few days. They refused to accept any payment except for the rehydration packets they'd bought. I am forever grateful to them and I think of it and try to pay it forward whenever I can.
This is my earliest memory. When I was two, and did not yet know how to swim, I was visiting with family who had a place right on the river Thames near Henley. I was running around with my seven cousins, but I was the youngest and at some point found myself alone. I wandered out onto the towpath beside the river, where they had a small jetty.
Earlier an older cousin had been out in the canoe and it looked easy enough. I put one foot in and realised my error immediately, toppling into the water. I remember clearly the water bubbles going by and thinking 'Oh dear, my mum is going to be so angry about this.' I came back up and saw a couple now running up along the path -- they had seen me go in.
I don't remember anything else. I'm told the man fished me out and then there was a great kerfuffle as I was hung upside-down and coughed a bit. My cousins got a massive earful from my mother, who was furious with the eldest in particular for losing track of me. My father taught me to swim.
The man was thanked profusely, but we don't know his name. I hope he had a wonderful life and I'm grateful for mine.
Not a stranger but strangers I was returning home from an event early evening. Being absorbed in my thoughts. I got both my front tires free spinning without traction in a ditch.
Although this was in Nigeria, we have this certain camaraderie through hardship, it was still extremely surprising seeing a group of 6 men come out of nowhere, having nothing to do with each other aside being passerbys join hands, exerting sweaty effort to get my car out a ditch by 8pm.
Left me quite an impression
Reminds me of when my wife would drop her loaded-for-touring motorcycle in a parking lot. People would crawl out of the woodwork to run over and help her pick it up.
I’ve dropped mine on rare occasions, and nary a soul even looked my direction. :-) (But thankfully I’m a grown boy who can pick it up myself.)
I high-centered my car on a drift coming out of the Taco Bell drive thru - not a minute passed before ten or so people appeared out of nowhere and pushed me over and out.
Literally, the moment before there hadn’t been anything around but me and that Taco Bell.
We had a blizzard that dumped 3 feet of snow in a weekend, my car got stuck, and about 6 people came out of their warm cozy houses to help push it. On a separate occasion, years later someone driving by stopped their car to help when they saw me stuck on the side of the road.
We grew up very poor, and I can't count the number of times someone helped us through a difficult situation - there are plenty of times we were on our own and there wasn't any help, but also times when someone noticed and helped. The help was always so appreciated- it lessened the suffering considerably compared to the times when we were on our own with whatever problem.
Me, Austrian and two Austrian friends were doing a road trip through western Canada. We had a rental car with a remote key fob, and forgot the key fob on the cars roof when driving off for a multi-hundred kms trip. It obviously got lost and when stopping the engine at some random town along the way, we couldn't start the car anymore. (Luckily we had the trunk open when realizing that.)
An elderly lady we met at the parking lot offered us, three random strangers in their 30s stay at her place for the night. Her nephew even drove to the camping area where we headed off and probably lost the key. It was heart-warming.
After returning home we sent her a huge Christmas packet with typical specialties from Austria. (Pumpkin seed oil and others. :-) )
I'll write her a letter this Christmas.
ah, pumkinseed oil. the one thing i miss from austria. but what happened with your car? did you find the key?
I guess this is me being nice…
When I was 20 or so I worked at a pizza place (Godfather's Pizza in Kansas City, FWIW). I suppose because I had a high school diploma, the manager had taken a liking to me and made me "shift supervisor" — which is kind off like assistant to the manager. Anyway, I was often left in charge to close the store with a few of the high school hires.
I often noticed a family come in on Tuesdays or whatever when there was some kind of promotion like get a large for the price of a medium or whatever. They often had some coupon you cut out of a newspaper so they could save another $2 or whatever. They were quiet and I decided they were not very well off.
I had a flashback to my own childhood: where going out for pizza with my sister and (single, working) mom was a real treat for us (and with the coupons, or free drinks).
When they order I make an extra large rather than a large. Unfortunately, this night, I think the pizza was left a touch long in the oven and it comes out with the cheese a little browner than I would have preferred. I was a bit embarrassed handing it to them and then even more embarrassed when they didn't even bat an eye but quietly accepted the pizza.
I decided nonetheless to make them another pizza and when it was done I brought it out to them in a to-go box—apologizing for the first pizza.
I can't know how it made them feel, but I was happy to be in a position to do that. (To hell with corporate profits, ha ha.)
I'm continuously delighted by the whole open source software ecosystem. I'm using nixOS with KDE and this setup has made me feel incredibly powerful and excited about computers once again. I'm very grateful to the thousands of open source contributors that have made this possible.
Not sure if this qualifies as a "stranger", but a nurse at the UCLA Cancer Center in Santa Monica helped my family and I when my sister was on her last days, dying of cancer. It was a bunch of little things: she got us into a single-bed room; she cleared out a maintenance closet for the family to meet privately with doctors; she did some sort of meditation with my sister that helped calm her; she "translated" what the doctors were telling us; she told the other nurses (and the security staff) to leave us alone (visiting hours). Mostly, she was a human to us, not just someone doing their job. I'll never forget the horrible experience of watching my sister dying, but Nurse Suzanna made it so much better. She's an amazing person, and I'll be forever grateful to her.
BTW, here she is: https://www.linkedin.com/in/suzanne-travis-rn-ocn-reiki-cert...
Saved my life
At 15 years old, I stupidly rode my bike across the street in front of my high school on a red light. It looked safe, but a car was speeding in the opposite lane, and I had to turn back to avoid being killed. So now I was in the lane I had just crossed and another speeding car hit me, throwing me (and my bike) about 40'. I was dead on the street, and a stranger stopped to give me CPR. After a month in the hospital with a broken back, and the doctors scratching their heads because I wasn't a paraplegic, I was eventually okay.
I never got to thank him. All I ever learned about him is that his name is Mark.
I was trying to adjust the tension spring on a motorcycle rear-shock absorber in the parking lot where I worked. Suddenly I rotated the ratchet past a detent and it sprung with a tremendous force that locked on to my finger—holding it with an iron grip (literally). It's a little difficult to describe the mechanism, but I can tell you the pain was intense and immediate and I struggled with one hand now to try and pull back the steel cap that was holding my fingertips in its spring-loaded vise. I was pretty sure in some amount of time I would have to assume I would lose the finger.
So I looked around the parking lot in desperation and I saw someone leaving their car and head in to work. I had no idea who it was but I shouted "help!" to them.
The guy jogs over to me, looks at the situation and just cooly but quickly asks, "Tell me what you need me to do." (What an engineer, huh? I'm sure this guy was an engineer.)
I explain I need this collar pulled back against the tension of the spring and between the two of us (my one good hand) we just barely get it lifted to where I was able to tear free (yeah, the skin tore) my finger.
Wow.
Crisis averted. I profusely thanked the guy and then he just went on in to work.
Thank you stranger! It was made especially clear to me after the two of us struggled that I had not a prayer on my own.
Stopped in the dark on a December night on the shoulder of an interstate junction to change a tire after I had a blowout while driving. Under normal circumstances, I probably could have handled it myself, but I was getting about four hours of sleep a night because of tinnitus.
I was very nervous when a random guy stopped. My initial thought was, "Am I about to be robbed?" But it turned out that he was just a local aerospace engineer, and it was his hobby to help stranded motorists.
I was driving home with my family from a long trip having just bought a really cool camping trailer, a 1979 Airstream. Our vehicle died on the side of the road in a rural area. The owner of the property where we stopped was mowing his lawn and came over and asked if we needed help. When it became obvious our vehicle needed a tow, he used his own truck to bring the trailer onto his property. And he kept it there for a couple of weeks while the engine in our vehicle was replaced.
I'm really not sure what I would have done with the trailer if he hadn't offered to help. We were more than 600 km from home.
In the UK we used to have a nationalized rail system. People were always rude about the late trains, stale sandwiches etc. But I once managed to leave a bag Xmas present on a train. I only realized when I got another train. They were so helpful, they managed to find the bag and have it sent on to me. I think we lost a lot of that good will when the UK rail system was privatised. And the privatised trains were still late, but much more expensive.
I think this really nails something people struggle to put into words: it wasn't that the system was perfect, it was that it felt human
I think making system more efficient often squeezes the kindness (and resilience) out of them. I have spoken to NHS workers who said that they used to do various unpaid overtime but, now they had opppressive management, didn't any more. Obviously things need a level of effiency, but there is a point beyond which it becomes counterproductive.
I've left my bag with my laptop in a station a year or two ago and went to lost property and they called me when they found it and I got in back in a day or so, I guess if they have a specific lost property office that's kind of their job but it's nice that no one tried to steal it or anything
I agree. The railway now is mean, willing to prosecute, unhelpful and expensive
I've read various accounts of people trying to reclaim lost baggage and it's a Kafkaesque process designed to be totally useless
But the railway operators are 50% nationalised now. Northern, TransPennine, South West Railway, LNER, Greater Anglia, c2c, ScotRail, Southeastern, TfW are all government owned.
And the forerunner in increasing fares the last couple of years has been...the government. They renationalised various operators during and after COVID and are now busy decreasing rail subsidies and increasing fares.
(yes even with the freezing of some fares in April. It's only some fares. And prices had been going up multiple times a year in many places for a few years. There is a wider picture and other schemes happening pushing up prices)
Maybe Great British Rail will slowly and surely return us to a less mean system. Time will tell
I left my bag on a train recently. I’m not sure I can describe “describe the bag using an online questionnaire that took about two minutes to complete” as Kafkaesque… bag returned in a little under one week.
Did you try contacting someone to get back sooner? That's what the people did in the cases I referenced - just people not answering the phones, dead lines, "computer says no”, passed around, refusal to help etc
I guess you being somewhat fine with waiting a week meant nothing important was in the bag.
The trouble with the UK is we continue to put up with the bar getting lower and lower each year. Honestly someone would defend it taking a month to get a bag back as being fine
The UK railways are expensive, and I have a car, so I very rarely go by train. But all those road trips cost everyone else, in terms of congestion, pollution etc. Maybe the railways should be regarded as critical infrastructure, run at a loss and subsidised accordingly.
You mean nationalised?
You realise even the subsidies go to pay Canadian pension funds [0]
0: https://weownit.org.uk/who-owns-our/railways
yes, nationalized and subsidised.
Brings back memories of a recent 16 year old stood in tears whilst they took her details to prosecute her because she was travelling on a child ticket "but my mum always bought me a ticket".
No mercy. Fuck those guys.
Same guy that stung me for not having a ticket when every other day they'd come round and let me buy a ticket on the train.. I even went to the window at the destination for a ticket, and then got referred for a penalty fare. Fuck that guy.
Yeah for many years the railway would let a lot of things slide even though they've had the legal right to prosecute.
Many people find out the hard way just how many legal powers the railway has (they have even more they could enforce, such as dropping litter, or playing music, or being inebriated - criminal offencs with no excuse)
The social contract of buying a ticket and behaving in return for good customer service has broken down, it's gone. It's really the entire of the UK at this point.
I was doing my 3rd 70.3 IM and I was doing badly. Something was off, I had been loosing power since the second half of the bike leg and come run time I was barely making 8 min/km. I was supposed to be doing 6. Seeing no point in continuing, I had decided to step off the course. Then a woman (older?) recognized me and asked me how I was. I told her about feeling horrible and stopping. She told me that’s stupid, that I should continue, it’s not so long any more. I did and, against all rational odds, against all logic, started feeling better and did my first ever negative split hm. It was likely dehydration and the aid stations helped. I don’t know who she was. I was so out of it, I did not recognize her and do not remember her face despite her knowing me by name. That experience of hope against all odds…
One of the nicest things a stranger has ever done for me, and I still wish I had the wherewithal to ask for the persons name - I was flabbergasted at the gesture and somehow I managed to stammer out a thank-you but not much else.
My team and me had just won 2nd place with a prestigious competition and decided to spend a chunk of the prize money right then and there: Wanted to get myself a nice backpack (Victorinox) but as I was a student at the time and the prize money would come much later, I came a significant amount of money short... This person just handed me, in cash, a hundred dollars. The backpack is now over 10 years old, and I still use that backpack daily with lots of pleasure, and only has minor scuff/wear and tear marks. It's been a fond memory to revisit, also because the memory is attached to my first time visiting Seattle (and Microsoft HQ). If the person that handed me that cash all those years ago reads this: Thank you so much, I would love to share what I've been up to.
There's a corelation between how nice people are in general and how well laws are enforced. More consistent enforcement means people trust that other's are not getting away with stuff and so they can settle into assuming the best most often, instead of having to worry.
I feel like many places have forgotten that. Maybe law enforcement got too expensive or there were too many corrupt police but so much now is no longer enforced and so the selfish "it's okay if I can get away with it" types are winning.
Reading through these things, I was thinking about how being a high trust society is incredibly important (though to be fair, I harp on this a lot).
When I was in Cape May, I walked to the beach, and realized I'd forgotten my access pass. The person at the entrance let me borrow her bike to ride back to the house to grab my pass and bike back. You do that when you trust the people around you to behave honestly. Any time you do something to reduce that trust of strangers (it doesn't have to be crime), we erode the high-trust environment and make everyone a little worse off.
Thanks to all the kind strangers discussed in these comments for having and building social trust through your actions. Collectively, we build a safe, happy society through small kindnesses.
My old BMW GS (motorcycle) engine jumped timing chain for whatever reason and completely gave up the ghost on a busy highway in Poland, a random motorcyclist on a streetbike saw the white smoke cloud and understood what happened to me as I coasted to the side of the road, he stopped, asked a few details and said "get on your bike, I'll push you to the nearest shop". I didn't speak Polish and his English was not great too, but we managed to understand each other. To this day I do not know how he managed, but he was able to control the gas on his bike, align himself to the back and off the side of my bike and kept giving me these push impulses so I could keep moving, and moving we were, we travelled ~6 miles to safety doing ~30mph, I thanked him and we went out separate ways. This experience feels surreal, I literally didn't spend any time in danger lingering on a busy road side or waiting for a trailer, which can take hours.
A stranger risked his life to save me from drowning in Costa Rica.
Similar-ish. A stranger saved me from drowning when I was a kid. I actually only have vague memories of this though.
I could write all day about the times people helped me that I know about, and there's others I suspect, and surely others I never suspected.
One that comes to mind was when I was on my own as a teen, and fortunately had a community college co-op student internship. My coworkers looked out for me in various ways, both professionally and personally, as if it was just ordinary for them.
I also found some similar above-and-beyond goodness by people at Brown University.
So that's what I knew in adulthood, until later disillusionment.
I still try to promote the way that I know exists, and I recognize a lot of other people who live that, or are ready to switch to it.
I had many cases of help from strangers in my life. One was not from a total stranger, but still.
I was couchsurfing with a bicycle, and was not able to find a place to stay on the last day. So, instead of trying I asked a guy where I stayed the first day if I can return. Not only he agreed, but also helped to get to the airport with my packaged bike.
Another case was when I stayed in Jordan, and the guy who I rented apt from helped us so much for free. He helped us to get to the dead sea (with two bikes, no less!), fought for the price with street traders so we could get an honest price and so on.
And the final and best story is about a people who found us trying to put up a tent during the huge storm in iceland.
They invited us to spend a night in their camping cabin and shared their dinner with us. This happened after we were going 12 hours through the storm with a heavily packed bikes. IT felt like an angels touch. I almost cried due to happiness (I hardly ever cried back then).
First thing that comes to mind is a young man in Tokyo taking me and my then-gf to our ryokan after we asked him for directions. He walked over 20 minutes with us, clearly using up his entire lunch-break at work, to get us right to the door, going completely out of his way. We were just asking for general directions, but he took us all the way. We couldn't believe how gracious he was, and luckily we were able to gift him some chocolates from our home countries. Not a good lunch, but I hope he enjoyed them.
I live in a neighborhood where every street has a cul-de-sac. Outside our neighborhood is a busy road. About 6 months ago our 100lb Great Dane escaped out the front door while we were bringing in groceries. My wife and I chased her around the neighborhood trying to get her back. We lost sight of her and she eventually ended up in the middle of that busy road. A young college aged kid saw her in the road stopped his car and chased her back into our neighborhood. We cornered her and I grabbed her collar. The guy headed back to his car after the dog was caught. I should have got the guys name. I was so angry at the dog I didn’t really know what to say to the him but I am still so thankful. It could have been a very sad day for our family without his help.
I lost my phone while I was out once. A stranger found it and started calling people in the contacts with my last name (I don't have any lock method) figuring they'd know a secondary way to reach me. That worked and I got in touch with him, and then he came by and delivered it back to me at my house.
Back when my daughter was small, I was waiting in a line to get to the ticket window at the ballpark. A woman walked up to us, said my daughter was lovely, and gave us 2 tickets to the premium section of the park (the fancy bathroom section as my daughter called it). We saw Manny Ramirez hit his 500th! What a nice gesture. Whenever we went back, and when I was making a bit more money, I always bought one or two tickets after that to give away. Being unexpectedly nice in an unexpected way not only put a bit of joy in my life, it prompted me to do the same. That reminds me. I need to do something unexpected for a stranger. Thanks for the reminder!
Took a few months off of work and decided to bicycle through the Philippines. One day was a very hard mountain stage, driving from Bacolod to San Carlos, on Negros island. Arrived at the top completely exhausted, layed on the roadside in an attempt to recover. Suddenly a car stopped and a young couple of locals handed me a sandwich and wished me luck. I'll never forget them
If a hill climb has you lying down at the top, that’s got to be a good hill.
When it all started, I had no training whatsoever, and, I carried a backpack with my stuff. But along the way, this all improved
I was backpacking in Australia in 2008. I talked to a girl when I was driving up the east coast und she gave me her brother’s numbers and said to call him when I was visiting Perth (west coast). I did, he invited me to live at his house for six weeks for free. After that, I was invited by a German to live at her house in Melbourne for another two month. I was so short with my money and that both were incredibly kind to me.
1. on A9 near nurnberg we caught a ride with a musician from munich (he played trumpet and showed us his music when i asked if he had any recordings in the car). it was heavily raining and it was late in the night. as we were approaching munich, he got off the highway and i was worried how we were supposed to get back on the highway in the middle of a effing night, but he just drove home and we stayed overnight. we ate breakfast together with the whole family (wife, kids) and he drove us off to the nearest autobahn entry on his way to the conservatory (he used to teach there) - we were going south, to italy. that's first top of my head, surely there is more. good times. we connected, big time.
Not the nicest thing, but when I was grocery shopping for Thanksgiving a few weeks ago, a stranger shared their “secret” for picking out good sweet potatoes (she was making sweet potato pie). She picked out a few for me. Just one of those warm fuzzy moments that we never get enough of.
This is nice
I was riding my bike home from REWE (supermarket in Germany) with two big bags of shopping. As I crossed the road I mounted a small bump that caused both bags to split. In that moment I sort of gave up as all my food rolled across the asphalt.
A Turkish lady got out of her car, went to the boot and got three heavy duty plastic bags out. She helped pick up the groceries, pack it into the bags, all the while ignoring traffic and halting cars. I said my most profuse thank you in German and all she said was: no problem. I still remember it often.
I was a small child at the zoo. I had lost my parents in the crowd, and was scared.
A nice black man (this was important because I grew up in a white neighborhood and hadn't encountered many black people before) knelt down to me and asked me if I was okay, if I was lost. They brought me to the zoo office where they called my parents.
I'll never forget how strange and different they were to the child me, and yet how kind they were in the sea of scary strangers.
When I was young, my future wife and I went on vacation to Tahiti. We took a bus from our hotel to the Capital probably only 3 to 5 miles away bust still a good walk away. I thought it would be easy to get a bus back both because I knew a little French and because I assumed buses could either go clockwise or counterclockwise around the island. Long story short my assumptions were bad and we got lost.
We stopped at a bus stop to regroup and there were two local men, construction workers as I recall, sitting at the stop. They got us back on track but more than that, they cracked open a 6 pack of beer and shared it with us. I dont know what those beers could have cost but it was not cheap. They were regular guys and we were lost rich tourists. In no world I would have imagined would they have shared those beers with us but there they were and they ensured we got to the hotel as well.
I will always remember that kindness.
Just checking prices and labor rates. Those guys gave like an hour of their work to lost strangers. I guess it's not the biggest kindness but it still made a lasting impression on me.
I would have loved to retire to Tahiti based on how wonderful the people there were to us but I gather lots of people have the same kind of experience with the hospitality and now it is too expensive to retire there :p
I love going out of my way to help people, but hate when people help me or give me gifts. I don’t know how to experience “pure” gratitude that isn’t overwhelmed by guilt.
I should probably talk to somebody about that…
My therapist told me you can't really give if you can't also receive. I'm in the same boat you are. Trying to get better at it.
In my second ever job, lawn care, a client wanted to give me a Christmas gift of some cash. I had a personal connection--I worked closely with their son in my first job.
I hadn't been offered a gift yet at work, and it felt wrong for some reason--I was young and naive. He insisted many times, and I refused.
When it was over, he seemed hurt, and he treated me in a less friendly way afterwards.
So that was how I learned the lesson. When someone wants to give you a gift, you accept it graciously. It's your duty.
My problem is, I feel bad if I don't put the gift to good use.
Allowing people to give to you is a way of giving to them.
I should probably talk to somebody about that…
Couldn’t hurt, because you’re robbing others of the opportunity to help. And, frankly, you’re not alone, I constantly run into folks that feel the need to reciprocate or otherwise make it transactional.
Giving a gift out of gratitude for a good deed isn't making it transactional.
I was driving from Sacramento to Reno, and there was a bad snowfall up in the mountains. I ended up getting struck in a small country town, and couldn't get up an iced hill. I thought I was going to be stuck there the entire day (at least), but a stranger pulled up in their pickup truck—with four wheel drive—and towed me up the hill and to safety. That's the most significant act of kindness I can remember—from a complete stranger.
I ordered the wrong thing on doordash yesterday and the store manager called me to ask if i was sure i wanted a pizza with no toppings. good on her for not delivering me a plain crust nothing pizza. she even had it in the oven already just in case. s tier human being
a homeless kid in a park
i got carried away reading, evening came .. i decided to leave, but that park was already closed and unlike most parks where i usually go, this one has absolutely no way out, they lock everything..
he noticed me, told me there's on spot where the fence is missing a bar, enough for a person to escape.. but not for my bike which means i'd have to leave it chained to a tree during the night.. not thrilled by that idea
that kid sat on the fence and help me lift the bike, grabbing the dirty wheel and everything. the bike was out, and i used the thin hole to get out.
felt crazy to me that this kid went that far to help a stranger
i went back there a few times with some money but didn't ran into him, until a month later our paths cross so i could thank him
Did a road trip in our teens from Melbourne to Sydney. On our way back we stopped at the petrol station at Pheasant's nest. We were nearly out of petrol, didn't have any money. My friend had some cigarettes, so we started awkwardly trying to sell a pack to people, just needed about $20 (back in those days petrol was a lot cheaper and obviously the dollar had better value). We approached a lady with her kids, told her our story of needing petrol to return home, and we had some cigarettes if she needed. She straight up gave us a $50 without asking anything in return.
This has been burned in my memory going on for more than 25 years. I have gone over and beyond for both people and strangers, but I have yet to be in a similar situation to pay it forward.
I was riding my dirt bike way the heck out in the mountains where there was no service.. at some point I realize I lost my phone. I went back to look for it but it was hopeless. I used my friends phone to log into my apple account and set it to lost mode (so it has contact info when someone finds it, and alerts me when it gets service again). Later that day my wife gets a call from my phone, we meet the guy at a gas station, and pick it up. He lived pretty far away and he insisted on meeting me halfway, and didn’t seem like a person of means. He did accept a finders fee at least.
A lot of people have done a lot of nice things for me, that one kind of stands out since he didnt seem like he had much.
I have a lot of such stories while riding dirt bikes. Kind of need to depend on the help of others if you get wedged or injured.
I will also never forget the CEO who gave me 3 paid months time off when I was hospitalized / sick. I think it was a risk for him since it was unclear I would be able to work again, but fortunately I made it back.
It's often the folks with the least who are willing to give the most.
I've heard that said by many, but it's been my experience as well.
Oh, you jogged my memory. Coastie here again. Soon after moving to the west coast, 1980-ish, I lost my wallet around Easter, on or about University Ave in Palo Alto, and a kind stranger found it and dropped it off with police, IIRC. He wouldn't take any more than a lunch or dinner at the Good Earth. This was B.C. Before cellphones.
On the other side of the coin, I was leaving a thrift store in San Leandro and saw some black thing on the road. I was stopped at an intersection and picked it up. It was a wallet with $500 in it and a woman's out of state personal and business ID., but no local address or phone number. I took a real chance and left it with the thrift store staff, hoping they could find her. Perhaps she was just there? Well, they said later that they found her through her bank, and returned it to her. I forgot if it was before or after, but I did purchase two Klipsch Heresy Speakers there for $50 total.
Kinda a similar story, I slipped off my bike at the end of a wet turn and scraped up my leg.
A woman passing by saw the whole thing, and said she lived nearby and would happily run me a bath.
I took her up on the offer, and, um, I was a few hours late to work that day :-)
Are you Val Kilmer? :)
And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson
Wow, "Dear Penthouse,"
I got a working visa for Japan when I was 18 (in 1999), and one night while moving from one hostel to another on the weekend, I fell asleep and missed my train stop. I woke up in the middle of nowhere. It was the last train, it was raining, I had no money on me and the banks were already closed. As I stood there under an awning two ladies asked what I was doing. I brokenly with the help of my dictionary explained the situation. They didn't understand me but flagged down a business man who spoke a little English and he called a taxi, sent it to my hostel and paid for it. It was quite expensive.
I think if I'd go down memory lane I would come up with quite a lot. But one sticks out immediately.
I was in Thailand on a bus, with only Thai people, it was a really local bus. The bus would stop around every 30 miles/50 kilometers. I didn't know that. I needed to get off at a particular stop as it was close to the meditation retreat I was going to (Phitsanulok). I miss the stop. I figure it'd be fine. I didn't realize the 30 miles thing. So after half an hour of driving I ask the bus driver when it's going to stop. He said he'll stop in another 15 minutes.
It was about to get dark. I asked him if he could please stop now. I was 25 miles away, it'd be rough but 8 hours of walking is doable. He stopped, now I was on the side of the road. It had gotten dark.
I noticed houses next to the side of the highway. It was a strange sight to walk next to a highway and see houses next to it. In one case, I saw a father, mother and 2 children outside ready to go inside.
I asked them for help. They didn't speak English but listened. With our hands and feet and a bit of Google Translate, I got to tell them my story. The father looks at me with understanding eyes and gestures for me to get on the back of the moped. I get on the back. He brings me to a police station. He says they'd take me to Phitsanulok.
In the police station, no one was there. There was one light on and blinking. The room itself looked grey-ish white. I felt like I was in the beginning scene of a horror film. Before the father left, I asked him why there was no one here. He told me that the policemen were having dinner and they'd probably be done in an hour. I sat there for an hour.
The policemen came out, they looked at me surprised. They spoke English, I told them my situation. They said "alright, get back in the car". And they just gave me a whole ride of 25 miles to where I exactly needed to be.
To say that I was grateful would be an understatement. I offered them money, because while I know that they are just working, I reckon that this type of stuff is not in the job description of a policeman. I was purely offering it out of gratitude. They said no. I offered 2 more times, they still said no. I did my best to show I was incredibly grateful and I think they got the message, haha.
Thanks to those Thai policemen, and other acts of kindness I've experienced over the course of my life, I will pay it forward. Not because I feel I have to, mostly because I see how wonderful that attitude actually is.
I love that things like Google Translate make this possible now. If someone has a phone/computer, you can break the language barrier, it really helps compared to the alternative
Not as meaningful as some of these but one that stuck with me.
I had a door to door selling summer job in America at 21 after leaving university (I'm a brit) .
The job was primarily on the Eastern Shore in Delaware. Everywhere I went a kept hearing about the famous crabs they cook. One chap whose door I knocked on asked if I'd had any yet. I told him I hadn't.
He sat me down there and then with his whole family to eat some at a meal with them.
I wish I could find them again and thank them properly.
I missed last train due to delays and there was a group of in the same situation. One nice person offered me to that I can sleep on their couch. And they were so nice to give me a ride to the station the next day.
I was so angry at first when I found out that this was my last train and I missed it but it turned out to be great story I can tell :)
Thank you strangers, I'll repay it back to somebody in the future
I was at an antique shop in Alameda about to buy a pulp sci-fi book. It was just a couple of bucks, nothing expensive. But the card reader wasn't accepting my Apple Pay. Another guy shopping there offered to pay for me. I told him I could Venmo or PayPal him the money, but he wouldn't take it. It wasn't a big deal in terms of money, but he didn't have to do that
My brother told me, many years ago "if you can do something nice for someone for a buck, you probably oughta just do it."
I didn't learn much from him, but that was a good one.
On one of my many trips to Europe, I was wandering around the downtown area, and having walked a great deal sat down on a park bench to rest.
Two very beautiful young ladies came up to me, and said you look like you need a hug. Instantly my spidey sense went on red alert, as I figured these two were pickpockets or scammers or ladies of the evening, since I was much too old to be of interest to them, and no woman has ever remarked that I was handsome. I asked them what they were doing, and they said they were just doing a project spreading kindness.
So I said ok and one of them gave me a truly wonderful hug, and I said thank you and they went on their way.
All I can say is "wow".
Not the same, but I've seen hugging brigades in many large cities all over the world. People holding up signs, "Free Hugs". I always exchange hugs
They made some open source software for me ;^)
When I was 12 years old I got run off the road while riding my BMX bicycle when a car pulled into my lane to park on my side of the street. I was going about 12-20 mph and could not stop since I only had rear brakes. I just locked the rear tire and the bike continued sliding on the dust covered road side.
I went over a platform and into a small garage pit used for burning trash. After I stopped rolling, I dusted myself off and thought, "well, that could have been worse". Then came a man running towards me, grabs my elbow and pulls the head of a broken bottle out of it. Blood started spraying everywhere of course.
After one of my friends that was riding with me used his shirt as a tourniquet, the man flagged down a (private) mini bus(that provides public transportation), to me to the hospital, stayed with me then, paid my bus fare and then took me back home to my neighbourhood.
I never saw the man again even though he probably lived in the neighbourhood next to mine.
Recently in NYC, I was offloading my car when a girl with a box of croissants and cookies came up to me as asked if I wanted a croissant. She that she mistakenly bought more than she could eat. I looked at her as if she fell from space for a second and she noticed. She then said she bought the from a nearby bakery and they were perfectly fine as she continued eating one herself. I hesitantly took one, which was still warm and bite into it. It was great and I told her girl so and thanked her.
I went inside with my croissant in hand and told my wife what had happened. I got the scolding of my life for eating food from a stranger. I had to throw the rest of the crossiant away of course. That sucked because that one bite was so good.
> grabs my elbow and pulls the head of a broken bottle out of it. Blood started spraying everywhere of course.
I learned in first aid courses that if something is stuck deeply in a wound, you should not pull it out, but instead fixate it with some bandage and go to the hospital like that. The reason is that it can start bleeding a lot more if the object is removed.
> eating food from a stranger
I think this rule expires when you become an adult and can judge the situation...
Just now, I'm travelling through India, and today was particularily rough. (I'm trying to go from Delhi Airport to Agra). Multiple Ubers turned out bad (scams, no-show, or fucking with pickup point). I spent several hours in this limbo getting nowhere. I end up taking a train without ticket on advice of multiple people around me, since the counter refused to sell me one.
Turns out, wrong train, going slightly the wrong way. But a guy walks up to me in the train, asks me where I'm going, and starts to help me get to where I need to go. He arranged a bunk for me, talked to the conductor for me, bought(!) another train to Agra for me, called hostels in Agra, etc etc. I've had multiple such encounters here in India, of people going so far out of their way to help me here, something you would honestly never see in my country Germany. It's like a strange incongruence, with one fraction of the population hell-bent on fleecing you for all you've got, and another that will go way further out of their way for you than you could ever imagine.
This correlates with tourism. Low touristy places you standout and people treat you nicer than normal.
In touristy places you are just a target. It’s just different places have different strategies for fleecing you. For example in Japan you probably wouldn’t even know you got ripped off but India they are likely so obvious about it you never get fleeced.
If you find the sheer number of people too much, do visit either Himachal Pradesh or Uttarakhand! You will find THE kindest people there. Though be careful of leopard and bear attacks in Uttarakhand right now!!
Oh, I just came back from Shimla actually. I stayed in Narkanda for 2 days to do some hiking, and Shimla one day, though I didn't interact with many people there. My next stop is Kochi, hopefully things are also a little quieter there.
Make sure you try to talk in English and see. Most people should know or atleast understand english there. And Kerala food can be spicy and it's hot out there. Make sure your drink enough water and stay hydrated.:)
Kochi is also a very nice city, but if you're coming from Shimla or even Delhi you're going to find it sweltering hot probably. It's about 26⁰C (80⁰F) right now... (I'm close to Kochi and honestly in these temperatures it doesn't even feel like Christmas)
Ps, Kochi can be quite bustling. The more remote and rural towns (like Munnar) are a relatively safer bet.
I was on a train from Miyajima to Hiroshima on a random weekday morning and an older gentleman sat next to me. I am a white American and I could tell he wanted to talk with me but was hesitant so I said good morning in my terrible Japanese. He wanted to practice English so we chatted and he ended up insisting on taking me to his local okonomiyaki spot in Hiroshima where he was clearly a regular. We had a 2.5 hour lunch and he hazed me with food beer and shochu and introduced me to the other octogenarian regulars. It was a really cool experience.
Eating at nice restaurant with my entire family. When we finished the meal the waiter came out with a dessert and said that someone across the restaurant paid for our entire meal. I was shocked, I looked around and I think I might know who it was, but they were already gone. That was probably a $150-$200 dollar check. I'm still shocked to this day.
A few years ago, I was in the drive through of a Starbucks on the east side of Seattle. A very shiny Porsche 911 was in front of me, and I was kind of rolling my eyes. Who needs to drive a Porsche to Starbucks? Douchebag.
Whoever it was paid for my order. Kind of a record-scratch moment, just completely changed my mood and was a good reminder to not be negative for no reason.
Who needs to drive a Porsche to Starbucks?
On Seattle’s Eastside? Someone whose Land Rover is in the shop.
Jokes aside, what are they supposed to do? Keep a Camry in the garage for those Starbucks trips? :-)
Some years ago, I left my wallet at home and had filled my car with petrol at the petrol station, and the lady behind me paid for it and refused to give me her details so I could return the money.
I was blown away and so grateful.
I have paid it forward many times over.
Similar to the author’s story, I crashed on my bike going pretty quickly on a busy road. No serious injuries but I ended up with scrapes and a softball-sized bruise which lasted over a month. But after I fell and got off the road a man sitting on his porch eating dinner asked me if I was ok. I told him what happened and he quickly grabbed some tools to fix my bike and alcohol and bandages for the wound. His roommate came home and assumed we knew each other but nope he was just my guardian angel. I hadn’t thought about this in a while… now I’ll be sure to remember it again.
I worked on a summer camp in the USA in the 1980s. We had a day off and went into the small local town (Kent, Connecticut IIRC). A small group of us British students went into the local bar for a beer before we went back to camp. The barman/owner was quite slow about giving us the bill for the beer. This is going to be expensive, we thought. But he just said 'It's on the house. Tell people Americans are nice when you get home'. It was a small kindness, but greatly appreciated by some poor students.
I missed an unprotected international connection out of New York due to a weather 6-hour delay.
Another passenger saw me crying on the phone with my father when I had to ask him to help me buy a new ticket back home. He (and another elderly passenger) cheered me up and offered me to stay with him until the next flight out the next afternoon.
Took me (male, 21) to his room, took care of me until my flight and told me to pay it forward.
It was one of my first intentional trips and it had all gone to shit even before this event. I flew back home with like 30 euros on my account.
About six months ago I was walking home from the grocery store in Sparks, NV and decided to stop by the local swap/meet. I had all my groceries in bags that I was carrying. During my time there I was jostled by the crowd and felt a little uncomfortable. When I got home I dumped out my groceries and found _two_ boxes of Girl Scout cookies that I didn't buy (I hadn't even seen any for sale). I had been reverse pickpocketed! I'm going to remember that for a long time :)
Gave me a can of gas.
Out in western Kansas, riding my motorcycle to go see my dad who was working in the field. Didn’t know the gas light on my bike was busted. Engine stalled in the middle of nowhere on an early May morning. I hiked for a bit and knocked on a farmhouse door. The guy and his wife offered me a coffee, breakfast, and a gallon out two of gas (85 miles of range on a bike). Can’t thank them enough.
I’ve tried to return the favor 10x fold to strangers.
Was busking on Oxford with an accordion. An American tourist gave me a bottle of wine.
Less exotic than some stories here but I remember it 20 years later.
January 2009.
I'd been (reluctantly) going to Mozambique for a service job on a vessel, reluctantly as my grandmother was rather worse for wear and I feared she was nearing the end. She urged me to go, though, and to tell her all about it when I got back.
She died while I was in Maputo harbour, waiting for the vessel to dock so I could get to the airport and back home.
Can't remember much of the flight from Maputo to Jo'burg, but from South Africa to Frankfurt was terrific, considering the circumstances.
A stewardess quietly pulls me aside as I am about to board the flight to Europe and asks me something like 'Gee, you look terrible, what happened?'
I just shrug and tell her my grandmother died a few hours ago, we were really close, and I felt terrible for not being with her &c.
Next thing I know, she's hugged me for a long time - to the annoyance of people queuing behind me - before dumping me in a vacant seat in business, tells me she'll be back the moment we're airborne.
Sits down in the adjacent seat, starts asking me about good memories about my grandmother, talks to me throughout more or less the entire flight, ensuring me that her job is to make me as comfortable as she can given the circumstances.
Once we landed in Frankfurt, she asked if I was OK going on alone - she'd be happy to accompany me all the way back home if I needed her, Lufthansa would make that work, no worries.
We still exchange Christmas letters every year; I mailed this year's on Friday.
God, the world is a beautiful place more often than not. Easy to forget sometimes but stuff like this is a balm
One time in Boston a stranger literally pulled me back to the curb as I was about to walk out in front of a turning UPS truck. (This was long before smartphones; I was just being an oblivious idiot without any technological assistance.)
When I was very green, a nice startup CEO gave me a job I wasn't really qualified directly.
Within 3 years I went from a college dropout with nothing going on to making 6 figures.
That was a long time ago and I've been comfortable ever since.
2 evictions before I turned 19 and I haven't been evicted since.
Life is good.
I was gifted an ivory keyed Steinway grand piano in high school by someone who heard me play a couple of simple pieces in a retirement home. I did not know him but a family member was an occasional acquaintance of his. It is a stunning instrument.
How do you play now?
When I was very little, like 4 or 5, a new family moved in on the street. I was curious, so I took my little pedal-racecar down the street to where they were moving in to say hi and welcome to the neighborhood. The dad of the family caught me staring wide eyed at his enormous collection of CDs and vinyls, and asked me what my favourite song was. I thought for a while and then told him track 3 from Nevermind by Nirvana. He told me to listen to the local radio station the next day at 3pm.
Turns out he had his own show on the radio, and he played my song! Well, Nirvana's song, but the one I picked. He even dedicated it to me and everything! I thought I was bonafide rockstar for years after that!
I guess I should qualify the story by saying, he was a stranger at the time, but not for long. His son was 2 years younger than me and we became best friends, and he was like a second dad for me too. But that came later.
Bobo is not with us anymore, but here's to his memory.
It was threatening to rain but I thought I could make it to my destination so I bolted out the door. Half way it started pouring. I stopped in the middle of the side walk, under a tree. I was watching a cat further down the sidewalk that was in the same situation so I didn't notice a lady pull up with her car.
She just handed me an umbrella and drove off after I said thank you.
They hired me. That was in 1996 and I still work for them today.
When I fainted on a crowded bus i Buenos Aires (as a tourist from Sweden) the bus driver stoped to check on me. When I wanted to get off and rest a while, two other passengers got off the bus with me to make sure I was okay.
I'm sure there must be more instances, but that's the first one I can think of.
I was in a city in a foreign country once and completely lost. A local showed me the way to my hotel and walked at least a mile with me. This was a long time ago but I still remember her kindness.
I went to Tokyo a couple of times for different reasons, and was frequently amazed by the people in the street or behind the counter in a restaurant, etc, who would stop and take the time to help me, often in perfect English, do whatever it was that I was failing with!
Yes! I have stories like that from every Japanese city or town I've been to. Easily the most hospitable, kindest locals I've ever encountered while traveling.
Although, I am often surprised by how kind/helpful/generally nice people are when I travel. Even in places like Paris or Glasgow, that have a reputation of being a bit rude or at least reserved toward outsiders.
Yes, this happened to me at the time. Most people had bad English and I had bad Japanese when I went but some of them were very kind.
When I was a kid, my uncle was driving me to a piano lesson and his car ran out of gas at an exceptionally long red light. Some young lady picked us up, drove us to the nearest gas station to get a jerry can, and back to his car to get us back on our way.
The first thing that comes to mind is one time when I was pretty drunk, in my late teens, hurt my legs trying a very ambitious(stupid) jump and then passed out at a bus stop. Woke up later, no phone battery, in the city about an hour away from home and nobody else I knew around.
Limped into a 24hr kiosk and asked to borrow their phone to call for a ride. Got a no. Tried explaining the situation, no sympathy.
A guy who happened to be in there saw that I was really not having a great time, came over and just hugged me and said it was gonna be alright and let me use his phone. No idea who you are, wouldn't recognize you if I ever met you again, but thanks for that.
Stories like this always hit me harder than I expect. Not because they're dramatic, but because of how quietly competent the kindness is
Someone held a door open for me so I had to pick up the pace.
I'm ugly so strangers aren't nice to me.
In all seriousness, people probably do more favors for attractive strangers. And HN is probably populated with average-looking people, at best. In some ways, this means that the stories posted here will be of true altruism.
On the other hand, if you asked a bunch of great-looking people what strangers had done for them, you'd get a bunch of stories about people who were very kind (but perhaps not entirely altruistic in their intent).
>at best
Ouch.
I'm open to the possibility this is wrong. But I'm pretty sure that HN is mostly male (85%?), and that men are more likely to do good deeds for attractive women strangers than women are likely to do good deeds for attractive men strangers.
For one thing, women (especially smaller women) would be wary of offering a ride to a man or letting him into her home.
If you read a few of the posts in this thread, you qickly notice a pattern: people in need are being helped.
Maybe you are not very adventurous? If your life consists of only hotel trips, best you can expect is a free breakfast upgrade or something like that.
If you're hungry and out of energy on a hike, someone might give you a sandwich. If you're drowning, someone might save your live. The situations you're in determine your experiences, not your looks.
Just recently I was going through my wallet downtown and I inadvertently dropped a $20 bill. A street denizen in a wheelchair picked it up and scurried to catch up with me and handed it to me. He would not take anything more than a thank-you.
They broke my ribs when I had a cardiac arrest, doing vigorous CPR. Would not be posting this now if it wasn’t for them. I was basically alive when the air ambulance landed, but wouldn’t have been otherwise
If it doesn’t break ribs then it’s not proper CPR
They taught us this in lifeguard training. Proper CPR is exhausting.
Oh yeah, it's got to feel like punching a bag of stale crackers or you're not doing it right.
Invited me to his house to cut and shorten some shelves for me, after the hardware store refused because I hadn’t bought them there.
When returning to Washington University in St. Louis, I was walking a few miles with some luggage. Someone offered to carry one piece with me to the dorm. It was only after reaching the dorm that I realized she was barefoot!
I know some people get annoyed at this because of the unspoken obligation to keep it going, but more than once I've been in a drive thru line where the person in front of me paid for my food. Whenever it's happened, I've tried to do the same for the next person. Just little things like that where I realize some stranger who has never met me wants me to have a better day mean a lot.
During COVID, by father was dying in a hospice center (from something else, not COVID). Because of the circumstances and the condition of the medical system, it was impossible to get into where he was to see him, and the staff was too overworked and understaffed to find a way to connect us to him. He was alone, fragile, dying, and terrified.
As my mother and I sat in the reception area fighting with the hospice administrator, a medical transport pulled up and unloaded another patient. After putting the new patient back in their room the driver walked up to us as we were sliding into a heated argument with the hospice administrator.
She asked the administrator what the problem was and was told that policy was visitors can't be going into the patient area and it was very firm. They'd had issues with the local government about being slack about it. The driver turned to me and said something along the lines of "here's what we're going to do:
Since I can apparently run around freely in this place, I'm going to find your father and put a star in his window so you can always find where he is.
Number two, I'm going to give you a set of full hazard gear.
Number three" and she turned to the administrator put her finger up into her face and very sternly said, "they are going to hire you as a part time employee, in maintenance, or IT support or whatever, and your hours of employment here are going to be whenever you need to visit your father."
she turned back to me, "but this doesn't mean it's a free pass, you are going to wear all of this hazard gear whenever you come 'work' here, promise me that okay?"
She then took the administrator off to a side room, had a conversation, and I had a piece of paper to sign about 30 minutes later making me an employee of the hospice.
I made it into and out of the hospice without incident for the next week until we decided to bring my father home to die as he wasn't receiving almost any care there. I don't know what the ambulance driver and the administrator discussed, but I suspect it was the absolutely woeful state of the facility.
The look on my father's face when a head-to-toe masked man entered his room the first time, and when I took my mask off to show him I was there for him, and how the terror just simply fell from his face, is something I will always remember as is the kindness of the driver who put herself out there for us.
The period was incredibly hard, beyond the situation with my father, the medical system was in absolute shambles, and as my father's health was rapidly deteriorating, it was among the only kindness we received during that wretched journey.
I had a lady sneak me in before my dad's surgery, in some area with no visitation. He was terrified as well, I think.
There's some real ones out there. It's so inhuman to let bureaucracy stand in the way of decency.
Thanks for your story.
My condolences for your dad.
This is a very heart-warming story though. Thanks for sharing.
Thank you. There is goodness in this world!
thank you for this uplifting thread!
---
I had some young family drama which kept me from studying for my first oral university exam. so I talked with the prof about it. he told me to bring a sick leave attestation from Dr such and such - or to come and give it shot. gave it a shot. "you can do much better that's obvious. I'll give you the weakest passing grade or I fail you and you redo the exam. your choice." wow.
Didn't expel me from university for an insensitive prank I accidentally sent to the administration instead of my friends. I discovered the university's email server was unsecured and thought it would be funny to send fake emergency alerts to my friends from the official university email. I mixed up the "from" and "to" fields though... oops.
I went to surf at Lower Trestles and forgot my leash. Someone nearby had a spare, gave it to me, and told me to keep it.
I was sent to collections for a rabies vaccine (well the immunoglobulin post-exposure part was the real expensive one) that was supposed to be reimbursed under a pharma/CDC program. Something like $17k.
I begged the guy that helped me fill out the paperwork for that program to give me something proving the hospital was paid. He broke the law and gave me the whole month's reimbursed list of everyone in that program. Hospital made the situation go away in less than a day once they saw I had it.
I will never forget his name since he put his ass on the line doing that and I never met him in person, just a few phone calls.
Beached a car and a neighbor kindly brought his 4x4 truck over, lined up the bumpers, gently pushed my car out of the drift. Dude was hella cool.
It is really interesting the very high percentage of comments are people who don't live in the US, or the story happened outside the US. I don't say this in a snarky "the US is full of assholes" way, just that's interesting and I'm not sure why that would be.
It’s because you were not really tallying.
I did the tallying for you. When specifically two countries were mentioned and it wasn’t clear which country the good deed happened in, I awarded 0.5 points to each of those countries.
The top country that is specifically mentioned is the USA. Of countries that are specified as non USA, they accumulated 34.5 points. The USA accumulated 37.5.
The tallying was done at 4:03 PM UTC on December 14, 2025
Here is the {position, score, country} list
#0. 42 Country not mentioned
#1. 37.5 USA
#2. 6.5 UK
#3. 5 Japan
#4. 4 Australia
#5. 2.5 Germany
#6. 2 Canada
#6. 2 India
#7. 1 Argentina
#7. 1 Bethlehem (Roman Empire, ~4 BCE)
#7. 1 Costa Rica
#7. 1 Iceland
#7. 1 Jordan
#7. 1 Nigeria
#7. 1 Norway
#7. 1 Philippines
#7. 1 Poland
#7. 1 Spain
#7. 1 Tahiti
#7. 1 Taiwan
#8. 0.5 France
Was in SF a day early for a conference, place I was crashing at was right next to golden gate park so I went to hippie hill to go hang out. Cute couple invites me to smoke with them, so I offered them beers. We spoke for a very long time, I don't remember much of it. He mentioned he went to art school, was having his first solo exhibition that week and showed me some of his stuff, which I genuinely thought was great.
When he heard that I had just moved cross country for work, he insisted on giving me one of his originals and some signed prints he just had made, as a housewarming gift. I joked about how badass it was that he had signed prints, he shrugged and played it off like they were only using school supplies to make a little fun money. It was just an A4 sized watercolor, it hung on my fridge for years with the prints
A decade later I had a friend over and they were asking about them, I couldn't remember anything so they reverse image searched on their phone. His exhibition was at fucking MoMA. His career took off after that and it is worth a decent chunk of change. I went and got it properly framed the very next day
I am running through my memory bank, and can't really think of one outside friends and family.
OTOH, I seem to be "that stranger" whenever possible. And that's mighty satisfying. People I've studied under or assisted with computer support have a habit of getting Nobel Physics Prizes. I have aggressively looked for and found, owners of lost cell phones and ipods.
Sorry to disappoint!
BTW, a friend is an M.D. While I was visiting his home, his cat scratched me, and I asked if he had any betadine. He didn't. So, you never know. Having been in the Coast Guard "Semper Paratus" always ready, I tend to bring small tools and first aid with me when I drive, but the only application so far was someone whose battery died in the SFO cell phone lot around midnight, and I had the jumper cable handy. The more serious one was when I was coming home and saw a light flickering in the neighbor's detached garage. Well, he wasn't welding. It was an electrical fire, and I made sure they knew about it post haste (they were watching TV in the front room). And that's about it.
My wife and I plus our (then) two small children were driving though France from the UK. I was towing a caravan and suddenly realised that the van had got a flat tyre. No worries, I thought, I have a spare, a jack and a wheel wrench. So, I pulled over and got to work changing the tyre. To my horror, I immediately discovered that my car’s wheel nuts were bigger than the van’s, so my car wheel wrench was useless for the flat van tyre! And all I had otherwise were small hand tools.
I should add that this was back in the days of dumb phones, long before GPS devices were common in cars, so all I had was a small-scale paper route map of France. I had no clue which way to go to find help, and no way to find a phone number. It was late afternoon, and we were still a long way from the campsite. I was starting to sweat.
But then a French woman with her daughter pulled over in a small car and asked if we needed any help. Using a mixture of my poor French and sign language, I indicated I needed a wheel wrench, which she pulled out of her boot. My joy and relief were obvious. I change the van wheel in no time, thanked her profusely, and off she went.
But there was twist in the tale: my hazard lights had been flashing so long that when I tried to start up the car, all I got was that sickening tick-tick-tick sound of a dead battery. Could my day get any worse? But then I remembered that my van had its own battery! A quick battery swap-over later, and we were back on the road, and had a great holiday, all thanks to the kindness of a big-hearted French woman who was kind enough to stop and offer help to foreign strangers stuck in the middle of nowhere.
I'm convinced that gratitude is a superpower. If you can recognize and acknowledge the many good things that come your way, your life will get better, as will everyone else's.
I can't really think of anything unfortunately, except courtesy stuff like holding a door. People don't really interact with strangers where I live.
where do you live?
A few years before Covid, I was driving to work in San Francisco and I stopped at a Philz Coffee in Marin County, as I often did. It was a usual workday morning and everyone was looking down at their phones while waiting for their coffee. We were all preoccupied and eager to get to work.
All of a sudden, some guy who looked to be in his 20s comes in clearly not from the area. He was dressed like a backpacker and he seemed lost. He was studying the coffee menu and saying hi to those around him. His friendliness and being-in-the-moment-ness really touched me, helped to pull me out of myself. When I went to pay for my coffee, I told the cashier that I was going to pay for his coffee as well. While I was still waiting for my coffee, he went to pay and learned that I had already paid for his coffee. I was embarrassed, but I will never forget the look of appreciation on his face.
This is not to me but a friend of mine was climbing Mt Fuji in _winter_ (this is a serious thing you need to be prepared for, alpine climbing with lots of snow and ice) when he slipped and started sliding down the mountain out of control.
When he was about to fall to his death a father and son that happened to be there in a struck of luck managed to grab him and save his life. My friend had banged a few rocks in the way down so his leg was fractured and they had to help him down for hours.
They saved his life and risk theirs to ensure he had the best chance. They visited my friend in the hospital where he was grateful and teary eyed. And then the father and son asked him for money, straight up. My friend of course agreed on an amount to them, all in all, he didn't know how to repay them anyway and this was oddly simple. I found everything heroic and strange at the same time but a good story.
When I was about 3 years old, a man in a car tried to abduct me right in my front yard by offering me candy to lure me closer. An old woman we did not know witnessed this from down the street, recognized what was off about the situation, and rushed over yelling, scaring off the man. Not sure if I would be here today if not for her. My parents never were able to find out who she was.
The old lady stole your candy!
Reading all the other comments really puts a smile to my face (as cliche as that sounds).
Gave me CPR and saved my life.
Phoning an ambulance after finding me ~24 hours after drinking a bottle of antifreeze.
In general, I've found that people, even strangers, kind of look out for you. I've only had occasion to need this in America, but every time strangers have helped. What I found fascinating was that even late in the night, on a dark highway, a young woman would stop to assist. What a safe society.
Two of those occasions are when I crashed on my skateboard, and when I crashed my car. Both times, a young woman stopped to help me[0]. In fact, I'd be hard pressed to say when people haven't been kind to me. A girl on a train gave me the book she finished reading. A homeless guy helped me push a car[2]. I left my car open once with everything inside and a passing woman closed it for me and left a note.
But also the society built here assists competently when individuals cannot. After a motorcycle accident in the city, the ambulance was there to pick me up apparently (I wouldn't know, I have amnesia) within minutes.
We've always stopped to help when we can and have many times (a few in SF here[2]) but it is gratifying that others are also like that. The other thing I like is that people don't mind asking for help. I was at the Safeway up in Diamond Heights, all in my motorcycle gear (which some can find intimidating) and this old lady asked for help with her car boot. Why on Earth would I know? But it turned out to be a quick fix and while I sorted the latch out, this other elderly couple talked to me about the husband's Ducati which he used to have.
In fact, I have come to think about this non-kin pro-sociality as being some sort of sociocultural superpower among the societies that can practice it. It seems to me that the most successful societies practised this. Even in the age of empire, it seems some societies were more capable of pro-social outcomes. British imperialism was a brutal thing in many places and especially earlier in its time, but compared to intra-tribal violence among indigenous peoples it seems almost civilized. The bare minimum rise to civilization seems to have been to replace terminal fatal violence with non-terminal subjugation (which seems to have been a hard thing to achieve). The Maori left only a hundred or so Moriori alive, and ate and killed the rest. By comparison, the British had the Maori in parliament.
Similarly, the father of the Charlie Kirk shooter encouraged him to give himself up: placing his kin at the mercy of his non-kin society. I think this kind of non-kin pro-sociality is where the magic is in a successful society. But producing that is hard. As an example, no matter how much a young woman would want to help a man waving her down on the side of the road, she should not do so in Somalia. American society (and many others) has solved, for the most part, the problem of stranger trust. That enables this kind of cooperation, which enables large-scale coordination, which helps a society prosper.
This reminds me of what A Splendid Exchange says about the Qu'ran having rules on commerce and law: thereby allowing the Islamic world to prosper because any Muslim of the time could meet another Muslim of the time and know they lived by the same law (enforced by God, one presumes). This allowed stranger-trust across the seas.
Overall, quite fascinating. These societal innovations are devices that last for some period of time and provide a massive boost to those societies. Certainly whatever Dutch system existed to enforce joint-stock capital, a secondary market, and derivatives allowed them to coordinate to be the power they were at the time[3]. I wonder what the next such device will be.
The default of humanity seems to be to cooperate[4], so the hard part here is finding the device that fights exploitation of pro-sociality.
0: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2024-08-14/Fearless_Ame...
1: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Motorcycle_Accident
2: https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/Blog/2025-02-20/Car_Breakdow...
3: Though the flip side is the zielverkopers - people who turned labor into a tradable commodity but using what is in practice debt bondage
4: In some sense, all living beings are formed from cooperation
You might like reading Darwin's Catedral by David Sloan Wilson. It's a recent take on the old idea of group selection, a theory that attempts to explain the human drive to cooperate. In that telling, it would take some form of religion to coopt that drive and allow human groups to grow large and be nice to strangers. Or not nice when they're seen as out group. I find this explains a lot about us.
This class of book is something I enjoy. Thank you for the recommendation, purchased.
My rc drone lost signal and flew out of range several miles away. Being from a small town, the person who found it eventually found out it was mine, and he returned it.
Did he find it with a helicopter?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ffEYqGGYXRk
That was a plane ;-) I knew it was going to be that video before I even saw the jumble of letters at the end of the URL, it's one of my favourites :-D
I'm wondering if altruism is in decline, in this selfish age of social media.
I sometimes even get the feeling that altruism is seen as a weakness these days.
> I'm wondering if altruism is in decline
Altruism and empathy, by name, are targets of derogation by a major political movement in the US, at least. So, yeah, absolutely.
> I sometimes even get the feeling that altruism is seen as a weakness these days.
This is fairly explicitly the case, yes.
I don't think so, but people are so distracted, by their phones, that they don't notice that other might need help.
There's also two or three generations of people now who are absolutely terrified of talking to others, so you have to exhibit so level of distress for them to act.
Generally though, I feel like people want to help strangers, and social media makes that easier to do. We have a local organisation that helps those less fortunate, and last year they wrote on Facebook a few days before Christmas that they had five familie (I think if was five), who hadn't been able to get help elsewhere and if people had food, or money they could spare. Took them just a few hours to ensure a nice Christmas for those families. Without social media, we wouldn't have known, and it basically only Facebook that can reach so many generous people in such a short time.
On the institutional level there's grounds to believe it unfortunately (less welfare support, more military etc) Was thinking about the term "suicidal empathy" that some politicians have been bringing up lately (wrt migration policy). It's like a new derogatory jargon.
IMO it that it's harder to notice opportunities to help when you're glued to your phone 24/7
People seem to be more helpful to strangers in smaller communities, where there are fewer other people who could render aid, and where the consequences are perhaps more dire.
In a big city, meh, there's always someone else who could do it.
What is everyone's responsibility is no-one's responsibility. There are psychology experiements that back that up. Google 'the smoky room experiment' and 'bystander effect'.
Random passers by towed me out of a ditch in Norway, once in summer, once in winter.
It’s cool that this isn’t an Ask HN post yet there are still so many personal gems of stories in this thread. Good on ya, lads.
> He explained that he would stay with me until the medics arrived and that he would call ahead to make sure one of the doctors on duty would "take good care of me."
Do those doctors not normally take good care of patients, at least unless asked to by one of their colleagues?
I love the story. The road rash picture that shows up in the OpenGraph preview makes it awkward to share, lol
A concussion despite a helmet. Surely that foam and plastic saved a life.
I've cracked two bicycle helmets and I don't know if they saved my life, but I'm quite certain they saved me a lot of pain, at the very least.
I can't fathom how some people ride without them.
Another one just came to me, as I witnessed it yesterday on the train. A homeless man was walking down the train aisle, shaking a handful of coins and asking people for change in a long drawn out plead.
Everyone stared deeper into their phones until he went away, but when he came back a woman with a child handed him some change and he walked on without thanking her.
The kid asked "why did you give him money mummy?" and her response was simply "you see homeless, you give money" and that was the end of it. I just liked the implicit matter-of-fact decency in which she lived her life.
Giving me a simple bottle of water when I was in need
I've got lots of travel stories, not of which are as impressive as most of the other stories here, because I was never in a situation where I needed help but I have definitely experienced strangers where I'm a foreigner in their country just randomly deciding they're going to be nice to me. Nothing earth shattering, but definitely things that were the highlight of that particular trip.
The most recent one was walking through an "ancient village" in China, looking around at all the cool houses and poking my head into the obviously shop ones. There was one shop (I think, I never did actually find out!) with a load of traditional instruments that you could see through the open front door and someone playing to the side of the door. I poked my head in, and they stopped playing as they were too embarrassed to play for an audience, but I had a bit of a chat with her in Chinese about the instrument - it was a guqin, and similar concept to the guzheng I'd had a couple of hours of lessons on as part of my language classes back home. (The difference is that guqin is more like a 7 string violin without frets, a guzheng is 21 strings each a different note). About a minute later, a guy popped in and explained that the woman was shy playing in front of others, and when she told him that I'd mentioned the other instrument, he sat down and said "I'll teach you to play!". Which he did for about 10 minutes and then said, "Follow me, pipe, pipe, pipe!" He then took me down a small street and into a different shop that turned out to be a school for bamboo flutes (called xiao), which are like reedless descant recorders, so you have to make the base sound with your lips. Despite knowing the fingering from learning the recorder as a kid, I only managed to produce a note about 20 or 30 times from 100+ attempts, but they were impressed anyway. He sat me down to drink tea, and brought it all the other students and teachers and just had an impromptu tea party. Despite being in a bit of a hurry by then as I needed to catch the bus back to where I was staying before they stopped running about 10pm, I ended up being there for about 3-4 hours. They were probably going to just be hanging around their studio anyway, and the cost of the tea they used was probably a dollar at most, but it was a unique experience for me to see something that probably the other thousand people who visited that day would walk past and didn't even know existed! Plus I got to practice my language skills in a completely different way than I'd done before.
One act of kindness from me in my early 20s, when I had a year travelling around Australia, was offering to buy a meal for a homeless guy begging outside McDonalds. It seemed such a simple thing, but it was clearly very transformative for him. Obviously, he would get some money each day from people throwing coins into his hat, but he said that about 90% of people walked past him and completely ignored him, and even the people that donated usually didn't even make eye contact. He told me it was the first real conversation he'd had with someone for about 5 years and for just a few dollars and 10 minutes of my time, I was able to make him feel that someone did actually see him as a real human being with his own story to tell. It definitely shaped me as a person too, because I saw how something so simple and easy for me made such a big difference to him.
old guy gave all his money and energy to start a school to keep civilization from going bonkers. i never knew him and he never knew me but we still are related.
2025 years ago a guy none of us have met in person agreed to pay for our wrongdoing by agreeing to be tortured and die a humiliating death.
Not the time or place for this.
It's literally the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for me.
What about it is not the time or place for "this"?
Why not?
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Left 240$ in 20s in a money clip on the sidewalk grass of house near mine on the block
Warn me antipsychotics cause diabetes
Someone gave me the quarter I needed to unlock an Aldis Grocery Cart
Sent me 260 dollars.
I think the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for me was holding a door open or something similarly mundane. I don't have any other really nice or profound memories. Then again I have not gotten into any similarly bad accident as the OP (knock on wood)
I was in a car accident once, many years ago... nothing terrible but I was in shock (it was my first car accident) and in mild pain (bruises from the airbag and a headacke mostly). The other party came over and asked me if I had a phone. I was still in my car, trying to realize what happened. When I said that yes, I have a phone he said "then better call the police. the accident was your fault" (which for all I know was probably true), then he left to sit on the roadside and smoke a cigarette and scroll on his smartphone until the police and ambulance arrived, 15 minutes later. Because of him, they came with 4 or 5 extra vehicles, simply because I couldn't really answer their questions well ("how many people are in the other car? is anyone injuered besides you? are the cars still driveable or do they need to be towed?" all quesions I couldn't answer)
I overheard that he got a lecture from one of the cops later on, but still it was an experience that I don't want to make again anytime soon
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a person who gave it - downvoted me again :(
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Unpopular opinion: What does this have to to with hacker news, technology, computers, combinatorics??