This story reminded me of a similar story of my own. During a move, one of my cats disappeared. We were pretty sure she’d managed to crawl inside an open wall panel, but we wanted to make sure to cover all our bases because we couldn’t be 100% sure she hadn’t gotten out of the apartment, so my dad had “Missing Cat” posters printed up.

Fortunately, before he even had a chance to pick them up, we got confirmation that she was, in fact, inside the wall panel, as she started coming out to eat the food we’d left out for her.

A few days later, I was able to successfully retrieve her, and we got her moved with no further complications (well, other than my part-Siamese cat protesting her confinement in a carrier by singing the song of her people for over an hour straight in the car, but that’s another story).

A couple of months later, my dad had to print something else at the same shop. It’s only when he walks in to pick up the latter item that he remembers he’d completely forgotten about the posters.

Dad: “Oh, shoot, I just remembered, I had you guys print up some missing cat fliers and never came back for them. I’m really sorry; I can pay for them now if you want.”

Employee: “Did you find the cat?”

Dad: “…Yes.”

Employee: “Good. Don’t worry about it.”

That shop has earned some customers for life.

Related:
The Paw-Ster Campaign That Ended Well

Working mostly service jobs, I’ve never been able to afford a place that has a washer and dryer in-unit. So, I usually have to use the laundromat, and because I’m busy just about every minute of the day, I wind up having to go to a laundromat that’s open late so I can do my laundry.

I’ve put my clothes in and hop back into my car, because I’m also running errands. As I’m driving back, I notice the streetlights go out. The traffic lights are dark.

Oh no. 

I get back to the laundromat, and the lights are off. I hope that the cycle is at least finished, but no such luck. My clothes are dripping wet. The attendant is closing up, as apparently a drunk driver hit a utility pole, and it’s going to be a couple of hours before it’s fixed. Lucky me.

I load the clothes back into my car, hoping they don’t soak all the way through the trunk, and speed up the road to the nearest laundromat, and I pray that they’re open.

I walk in, and the attendant there looks at me, annoyed.

Attendant: “Last wash was half an hour ago.”

Me: “Okay… What if I just want to dry some things?”

I tell her how the power went out at the place down the road, and that I’m basically stuck with dripping wet clothes.

And this absolute gem of a human helps me haul my dripping wet clothes out of the car. I proceed to wring out the worst offenders in the parking lot, and she takes them and tosses them into the dryer, for free, spacing everything out in different machines so things dry faster.

By the time everything is in the dryers, I am soaking wet, and it’s closing in on 10 PM, but she helped me finish up and didn’t charge me anything but the first few quarters I popped in when I started. 

I thanked her profusely and tried to give her something, but she wouldn’t accept anything. So, I left a note for the owner with a glowing review. I hope it helped her out, but I never saw her at that laundromat again, so I have no idea.

It is sometime in December, and my son is four months old. He’s my first baby, so I’m definitely exhausted. My husband tells me to go to the store to pick up some formula since we’re low, but to also give me some time to myself for a little bit.

We have a few coupons because my son needed to be on some specialized formula, which was expensive, so any money we could save would help. It had been a long week, and this particular day was a day when it felt like nothing was going right.

I’m at the store getting the formula plus a few small things to treat myself when I get to check out. I had to go through the regular manned checkouts because of the coupon (it had to be run through like a check). I pulled it out of my wallet, and she started to run it through when it declined. She tries again, and it fails. She calls over the Customer Service manager to see if they could figure out the issue.

When it still didn’t work, she took me over to Customer Service to try it there, so I didn’t hold up the line. Interestingly enough, she and I have the same name and the same spelling, so we were talking about that.

She ran the check through again, and it failed, and she told me that because the check had been folded to go in my wallet, the numbers at the bottom wouldn’t read.

I lost it. I started bawling my eyes out. I was exhausted, my husband and I were tight for money enough as it was, and now, I had ruined the coupon we really needed to pay for the formula.

I told the manager that it wasn’t her fault and I was sorry for crying, I was just overwhelmed. She told me to wait just a few minutes, and she went into the back to make a phone call. She came back and told me that the coupon wouldn’t go through, but that she was going to give me the $15 off, and she would cover it. I tried to tell her that this wasn’t what I was trying to do, and I could pay full price, but she told me not to worry about it and to go home and get some rest.

That was almost a year ago, but I still think about it often because I truly wasn’t trying to get anything my way, but she still saved my mental health that day. I left a five-star review for her online, and I doubt she ever thinks about me, but I think about her all the time.

My immediate family is spread out across the USA a bit, but we normally try to get together for Christmas, which is also a family birthday. This year, most of us will be gathering, but my eldest brother and his wife will not be able to join us. His wife cannot travel because of a medical condition, and her mother passed away earlier this year, so (for that and other reasons) he will be staying with her, on the other side of the country.

Because there are so many of us, we pick names each year, so each of us only needs to buy one present for one other person in the group. (Spouses/significant others buy each other additional things, generally.) It means we can each get one person something nice, rather than trying to come up with five to ten presents for all the various people in attendance. This year, I picked my eldest brother’s name.

His wishlist had a variety of things on it, including a very nice pair of slippers. How slippers could cost that much, I didn’t know, but he wanted them, and I wanted him to have the nice slippers. I went to the company’s website on Monday, and they were having a Cyber Monday sale! I didn’t think too hard about why slippers would be on sale for Cyber Monday; I just called myself lucky (and used the money saved to get my brother another item from his list).

I ordered the slippers to be sent to his address and went on with my day.

An hour or two went by, and I had a sudden, creeping suspicion that I had ordered the wrong color. I checked his wishlist and then checked my order. I’d gotten the size right but had missed the color he wanted. Drat. I immediately tried to get onto the site’s help chat to see if I could quickly change the color before they shipped. After waiting on a “two-minute hold” on the chat function for almost ten minutes, I dug up their help number and called in.

I waited a couple of minutes before a representative answered.

Representative: “I’m sorry, but because of the high volume of sales happening today, I’m not able to switch the order. The best I can do is place another order for you for the right color slippers and send a return label for the incorrect pair.”

I wasn’t happy about this. It hadn’t been very long, and I was mad at myself for not checking more carefully when placing the order, and I’m not wealthy or anything, so I wasn’t prepared to place another order right that second. While I was waffling, the representative said, “Huh! Look at that!”, and I asked him what was up.

Representative: “Oh, I just saw that you’re in Chicago, I’m from Chicago.”

He said it gave him a little flash of nostalgia.

Me: “Thank you for your time. I’m not sure what I’m going to do about the slippers, but go ahead and send the return label just in case.”

Representative: “I will do that! Could you stay on the line for a moment? The phone’s going to start ringing again as soon as we hang up, and I want to just finish making this note here.”

Me: “Sure, but I’ll need to put you on speakerphone and get back to work.”

Representative: “I’m fine with that.”

I put him on speaker, and we chatted a bit while he finished up what he was doing. When he was done, we said our goodbyes.

I thought about it, and — especially given the rough past couple of years, and the fact that my brother couldn’t join us — I didn’t want to be responsible for my brother receiving a mildly disappointing present. I knew it wasn’t a HUGE deal, but I wanted him to receive what he actually wanted and asked for, so later that night, I got back on the site and ordered the right color slippers to be delivered to him. I figured I’d send him the return label for the wrong ones, and worst case scenario, if he were to forget to return them or something, then he’d have two comfy pairs of slippers and I’d be out a little extra money, but I’d manage.

A couple of days later, I got an email from the vendor saying that my order couldn’t be processed because of missing payment information or something. I logged on to check and saw that the first order I placed had been cancelled. The second was in process.

I have no proof, but I think [Representative] circled back and cancelled the wrong one for me when he was able. I could be wrong, but I used the same information for both orders, so it seems likely, and it’s the option that makes me smile — that he remembered and cared enough to go back and spend time he didn’t HAVE to, to save me a little worry.

Thank you, [Representative], and happy holidays!

My husband and I always bring chips, veggie dip, crudité, and his homemade hummus to Thanksgiving Dinner. Two days before the holiday, I stopped at the grocery store on my way home from work to buy what we needed. There was exactly one crudité platter left that had fresh-looking vegetables and — bonus! — it had a big, sparkly, red bow on top. When I got to the checkout, I put it last on the conveyor belt so it wouldn’t get crushed.

When the checkout clerk reached the platter, she exclaimed:

Clerk: “Oh, look at that! It’s so pretty!”

Me: “Isn’t it nice? And it was the last one left!”

Clerk: “I can’t find a price or a barcode on it.”

“So, that means it’s free, right?” ran through my head, but as a longtime reader of NAR, I squashed it and instead prepared to wait a couple of minutes while the clerk called someone for a price check.

Instead, she handed me my receipt.

Me: *Quietly* “Did you just give that to me for free?”

Clerk: *Smiling* “Don’t tell anyone!”

Me: “I won’t! And happy Thanksgiving!”