On 4 February 2014, _ThaRedditor asked, “What was the nicest thing a complete stranger has ever done for you?” As usual, Redditors had good comments:
1) MedicGirl wrote, “I was at a grocery store when my car died. I opened the hood and there was liquid oozing out of the battery. I called for a tow truck and they said it would be a few hours. I went into the store, tears streaming down my face, so I could sit somewhere warm. A guy and his wife walked up and asked what was wrong. I told them my car died and I was waiting on a tow truck. The guy asked to see my car and he confirmed my suspicions that the battery had ruptured. The wife sat inside with me and I saw the guy drive off. Not even fifteen minutes later, he came back with a brand-new car battery, hooked it up for me, and when I tried to offer him money, he just said to ‘Pay it forward’.”
2) VoraciousVegan wrote, “When I was young, my mom locked her keys in the car when we were in a very bad neighborhood. A teenager, walking by, asked if we needed help. She, naively, told him what she’d done and he walked towards us. He pulled out a set of nippers [scissors for metal] from his pocket and picked up a strip of sheet metal from the ground and broke into our car for us … within seconds. He could have easily driven off and left us, but he didn’t even wait around long enough for my mom to give him payment.”
3) SgtWiggles wrote, “These 2 extremely nice girls in high school saw that I was looking depressed and lonely during my first few weeks as a freshman during lunch and asked me to sit at their table. I thought it was just a prank or something since they were both juniors and popular/attractive, but they just wanted to make sure I was not lonely. We ended up sitting together for the rest of the semester and ended up being friends and just chatting about various things.”
4) JustAddMilk wrote, “My then-boyfriend and I were hiking on Purple Mountain in Nanjing [China]. Now while I speak Mandarin, I’m certainly nowhere near perfect, and it turns out Purple Mountain is more like Purple Mountains. So we get dropped off near the peak, and are expecting to take a cable car to a bunch of tourist-y stuff that are placed down the mountain.
“We get dropped off to find that the cable car is down for New Year. Not afraid of a little hike, we just set off, expecting to just have to peak and walk down. Long story short, we get really, really, really lost. Like ‘accidentally breaking into a military base’ lost, and hours have passed.
“We’re just starting to worry about reaching what we thought would be the base when a little old lady walks up to us with her hands clasped behind her back. I tell the woman, who only went as Grandma Wang, about being lost, and out of nowhere she grabs me by the arm and we set off. As we’re walking, she takes us on these detours to see these hidden gems, including a tomb in a cave, all while waiting for us to gawk before we continue. We continue like this for hours, during which time we talked about her family, my family, etc. Turns out she was actually finishing her morning walk when she came upon us, and that she was leading us the complete opposite direction from her house. We beg her to just point us the way and we’d do the rest on our own, but she insisted, saying ‘I have a daughter. Moms have a duty to keep kids safe.’
“She finally brings us to the peak we thought we were at in the beginning, and even smuggles us past the guards asking for tickets, before FINALLY turning around back for home. We made it to the base right about sundown, ignore the tourist sites and grab a taxi home.
“I had her cell phone number on my Chinese phone, but I wish I still had some way of contacting her and thanking her for everything.”
For Further Information: _ThaRedditor, “What was the nicest thing a complete stranger has ever done for you?” Reddit. 4 February 2014
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