Fun Time: Honest Cab Drivers Restore Faith in Humanity
Some years ago, I lost a laptop computer at a grocery store. I had placed it in a shopping cart while buying groceries and absentmindedly left it there when I unloaded the cart. I realized my mistake at home and rushed back to the store, but my laptop had disappeared. I put up signs offering a reward, but got no responses, much to my dismay. Meanwhile, someone else went to the grocery store and came home with a laptop. It was their lucky day. Even on Christmas Day, Santa is not so generous. Did they spare a thought for the rightful owner? Perhaps they did, saying to themselves, “Who is the idiot who didn’t protect his laptop with a password?”
One person’s misery is another person’s joy. But to be joyful about claiming a lost item for yourself, you can’t think about the other person. You can’t put yourself in their shoes—unless it’s a pair of shoes that you found. (If that’s the case, please walk a mile in them.) Thankfully, there are many people in the world who just can’t live like that. They return the laptop. They return the cellphone. They even return the Hermès bag. Rather than taking possession of a lost item, they do the honest thing—and take pleasure in the owner’s relief and gratitude.
Who are these people? Cab drivers!
Well, not just cab drivers, but it was an honest cab driver who reminded me of my lost laptop. A college student in Gurugram, India, recently shared his gratitude for a returned MacBook on social media. The student had taken a cab to get to college and left one of the two bags he was carrying in the vehicle. Inside the bag was the laptop. Even worse, he had borrowed the laptop from a friend for the weekend. Imagine losing a laptop and a friend on the same day!
He called the cab driver’s number, but got no answer. “My mind almost accepted that it was gone,” he wrote on Reddit. Along with his friend, he ran to the front gate, where he had been dropped off, and that’s where he spotted the cabbie, talking to security guards while attempting to return the MacBook directly to the student. “The rush of calmness I felt in that moment OMG,” the student wrote, using the commonly recognized acronym for Overwhelming MacBook Gratitude. The grateful student offered the cab driver a reward of 500 rupees, but “despite my repeated requests, he refused, saying I was like a kid to him. It truly felt like humanity is still alive.”
Cab drivers may not have a reputation for honesty, partly because some of them take advantage of tourists and others who can be easily overcharged, but many of them go out of their way to return items that passengers leave behind. One of the best examples of this happened recently in London, when a cabbie returned a handbag, believed to be a £100,000 Hermès Mini Kelly made of alligator skin, to a woman from Dubai named Hana Al Hai. She gave the cabbie a reward of £200 and offered him a free vacation at the hotel her family owns in Dubai
Right about now, you might be having several thoughts, such as these:
- I hope he goes on that vacation. He deserves it.
- I wish I could own a Hermès Mini Kelly.
- Poor alligator
Not all of us can own a Hermès Mini Kelly, but we can all aspire for something greater—to be as honest as the cab driver.
More of ChaiTime here:
http://www.khabar.com/magazine/chaitime/
Compiled and partly written by Indian humorist MELVIN DURAI, author of the novel Bala Takes the Plunge.
[Comments? Contributions? We would love to hear from you about Chai Time. If you have contributions, please email us at melvin@melvindurai.com. We welcome jokes, quotes, online clips, and more.]
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