I was on an eastbound train from Colorado two days before Christmas. There was some kind of incident in another car around 11:00 that night — a dude got wasted and started threatening other passengers — and we had to make a stop so the local police could come and collect him.

After the delay, the conductor came over the speakers and announced that if anyone was feeling upset or shaken by the incident, one of the passengers had offered to play his guitar in the snack car, and anyone who was awake was welcome to come down and join in for a singalong. I’m always down for weird train activities, so I decided to grab my harmonica from my bag and head down.

There were about fifteen of us in the car, ranging in age from sixteen to mid-seventies and from all over the country. We sang every song we could think of that even kind of referenced a train. We were somewhere in rural Nebraska at that point, and nobody had cell service to look up lyrics, so at times I was pretty sure that we were making up more of the words than we actually remembered. The conductor came through after a while and offered to play a few songs, so the guy with the guitar handed it off and pulled out a mandolin, and my harmonica got passed around the group while one guy drummed along on his backpack.

After a while, the conductor got up and left, and then he came back with a copy of The Polar Express. He read it out loud to our absolutely captivated group of mostly adult travelers while the snow flew all around us in the night, and I swear that for a few minutes, our trip felt every bit as magical as the visit to Santa Claus in the story.

Sometime well after the snack car was supposed to have been vacated for the night, we capped things off with the most ridiculously earnest rendition of Don’t Stop Believing that has ever been performed and went our separate ways. I never saw anyone from our little makeshift band again, but I’ll always remember that weird, wonderful late-night celebration of Journey and the magic of winter travel that came about because some guy was a jacka** on a train.

I have a hobby that I turned into a small business. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s kind of nice, and it’s a thing that I enjoy doing. Over the last five years or so, I have developed a reputation as a man of my word and someone who provides a great product at a fair price.

I live in an area that has a lot of vacation homes around a lake. These homes are owned by people who have $500k or more to spend on having a place on the lake to go on weekends during the summer.

Mary and Steve were two of these people. 

Mary and Steve own a couple of businesses; they are known for treating people fairly, even people whom they have fired will tend to acknowledge that they had it coming.

Mary stopped by my shop back in September. She wanted to hire me to do some work for them, for Steve’s Christmas gift. I could do what she wanted me to do; I gave her a price tag of $5,500. She agreed instantly. We shook hands, and I went to work.

I got it finished up on December 20th, just in time. I had to take a few days off from my regular job to make it happen. Mary was thrilled at the results. She went to get me a check, and she wanted to write it out for $11,000, double what we agreed on. I declined, telling her the $5,500 was what we agreed to, and that’s all I was going to take.

December 26th rolls around, and Steve shows up, thanking me for his Christmas gift, gushing over the craftsmanship, then complains that I wouldn’t take the bonus money that I was offered. I explained to him:

Me: “Mary and I agreed on the price, and we shook hands on it. A deal is a deal.”

Steve: “Well, at least, let me buy you and your girlfriend dinner… twenty-one times.”

He had a big s***-eating grin on his face. I should have known he was up to something. I thought about it, thinking about local restaurants, and agreed. Then he said:

Steve: “My choice. Any place I choose, all on my dime.”

In hindsight, this should have clued me in to the fact that he had something up his sleeve. I smiled, laughed, and said Okay.

The entire month of January went by I didn’t hear anything from Steve and Mary, which is fine; we’re not exactly in the same social circles. At the end of January, all of a sudden, my girlfriend just got super happy, like giddy. I knew she had a secret she was keeping from me, but I wasn’t sure what. She told me to pack my bags for a Valentine’s Day trip. We would be gone for ten days and bring my passport.

We got to the airport, and who would you guess was there, Steve and Mary. I was shocked as s***! Steve said he had a “debt to pay”, and he “owed us twenty-one meals, at a time and place of his choosing,” and he chose Rome, over Valentine’s Day. I tried to say no, but he threw my words back in my face:

Steve: “A deal’s a deal.”

The four of us spent the next week in Rome, Italy. Steve and Mary paid for our flights, hotel room, and twenty-one meals. All of our tours and transport were on us. We got back home on the 22nd of February. We had a great time!

Related:
Clients From… Heaven?

I’m taking a commuter train to a rock concert in downtown Salt Lake. Just before I board, I see an email from Discover Card saying my replacement credit card was on its way because it has been reported lost/stolen.

I think, “That’s strange, I don’t remember doing that. Is this a phishing email?”

But then I look in my wallet, and sure enough, my card is gone. I call Discover, and as it turns out, it fell out of my wallet when I tapped the fare payment card against the reader. I didn’t see it happen, but someone found it at the station. Rather than go out on a spending spree (because no one EVER checks ID or signature here), they called it in and reported it.

There are still plenty of good people in this world. They just don’t make very many headlines.

I worked at a fast food place in my teenage years, but I worked at a unique one, on a military base inside a large US military hospital in Germany that treated many of those hurt in wars. I was working there during the surge in Iraq.

I started to notice a soldier come in. He had intense burns all over his body; most of his face was wrapped up. You could tell he had burns everywhere, and every step was painful.

He would come to my fast-food place every Sunday and order an original chicken sandwich, with onion rings, everything fresh.

Quickly, I recognized he always orders the same thing, so one day I made a deal with him. If he sees me working, he sits at the closest table, and I’ll punch in his order, get his food, and take his payment at the table.

No, of course we weren’t set up for this, this is fast food, but I did it.

I did it every time I saw him.

Then one day, my manager was working on Sunday and saw me do it, he told me I can’t do that. I basically said, “I understand, I don’t care, I’m going to keep doing it.”

My manager tried to explain the reasoning (which I understand), and I cut him off and said I plan on continuing to do it. That was the end of that conversation.

I would even make customers wait if they weren’t also hurt. I remember one time I made a colonel wait for his food so I could get this soldier his food.

The colonel saw me do this, gave me a coin, and asked me what my name was and asked me where my dad worked. I was nervous. I just told him what I knew.

That night I came home, and my dad said the colonel called him and told him what I was doing.

At the time, my dad was an NCO, enlisted, so a random colonel calling him and giving him props over something his son is doing made him proud.

This story is part of our Readers’-Favorite-Stories-Of-2025 roundup!

Read the next story!

Read the roundup!

I’m on the till at a charity shop. I’m cashing out two women. One of them is gushing over these page corner bookmarks we sell.

Woman #1: “If you don’t stop, I’m gonna slap your t*t in a minute!”

Woman #2: *While cupping her chest.* “Which one?”

Woman #1: “I haven’t decided yet.”

Woman #2: *Walks out of the shop looking sad, and sits on a bench opposite the entrance.*

Woman #1: “Oh, and I’ll have this bookmark, please.”

She hands me the one [Woman #2] said she liked the most.

Me: “Oh, okay…”

Woman #1: “Look, she may be the most annoying person to ever walk the planet, but I’m the one who married her!”

She paid, left, and a few seconds later, I heard a squeal of excitement.