2008-05-20

Kindness of strangers

Once in a while, I am reminded that my life is supported by an endless streams of kindness of strangers. Here are two recent cases involving jump-starting cars.
The first one of the two cases happened last Christmas time while my family was visiting Hawaii. We were driving around in two cars and making frequent stop along a scenic drive. While stopping at one of those spots, I forgot to turn off the head lights. About an hour later when we came back to the cars, we couldn't start the car anymore. The first idea we tried is to see if we can get a jumper cable from some where to jump-start the car. However, most people in the parking lot was tourists with rental cars; no one has a jumper cable. Since we had another car that can start, we thought of drive to somewhere and get help. We stopped by at the first gas station a few miles down the road. We were very surprised that the gas station had a jumper cable and the attendant offered it to us. How nice! When we go back to the parking lot, we found the dead car was surrounded on both sides by other cars. We have get one of them to move in order to use our own car to jump start the dead one. We have to ask around a bit until we find a person whose car was next to ours. To our surprise, he offered to help us by using his car to jump start ours. He was very handy with the cars and it took only a couple of minutes for him to get the dead car started. Thanks to those two strangers, we were able to continue with our sightseeing and brought back beautiful memory of both islands and its people.
The second one happened on a trip to Oregon. A friend of mine has changed the car battery for us a few days before the trip. It was a long drive and I ended up in a small motel late in the evening. Next morning, when I tried to start my car, it was not starting. I ran back to the lobby of the motel and try to find someone to jump start the car. Luckily, a gentleman came in and said that he can jump start my car even though he is in a hurry to a meeting. He worked like a man in a hurry and was definitely efficient too. He pulled his car next to mine and in a flush, my car was started and he was on his way. The only thing I got to do was to say thanks and waved good-bye. Strangely, a little while later after a brief stop to take care of some business, I found that my car won't start again. Now, I have two things to do, starting the car again and figuring out how it keeps failing to start. Well, I managed to get get the car started again with another stranger's help, lucky for me, he also figured out that the connector for my new battery was bad and pointed me to the nearby hardware shop that might have a connector for me. I got to the shop and the first person I talked to was an off-duty employee. He was very friendly and offered to help me even though he was right in the middle of his breakfast. He located the right connector, but it turned out that removing the old connector was a big job. It took quite a bit pushing and pulling and trying out different wrenches, but he was very persistent and stayed on the task. It took about about an hour but he was able to put the new connector in its place. It has not given me any trouble since then, thanks to the help of another perfect stranger.

love thy neighbour as thyself -- Leviticus 19:18 (KJV)