Yesterday during lunch, Dad told me that he had just finished giving a ride to a lady who approached him in a parking lot and “promised she wasn’t asking for money” (eventually she did anyway). At first she just needed a ride, but along the way started making requests (“Can we stop by this convenient store?”).

Coincidently, I ended up helping a random stranger yesterday as well.

Around dinner time, Mason and I ran up to Lowe’s. As we were leaving I saw a couple trying to balance two 8′ fence panels on the top of their car. As Mason and I walked by, the woman looked at me, laughed, and said “Redneck engineering!” I laughed back and kept walking. I passed the couple again while leaving the parking lot and the man now had a big ball of twine, with which he was trying the fence panels to the roof of their car. The two of them were having a hard time keeping the fence panels in place even while the car was stationary, and there was no way those panels were going to make it across the parking lot, much less to their final destination (unless their final destination was “in the middle of 10th street”).

“Where you guys headed with those fence panels?” I asked as I pulled alongside their car.

“About a mile from here,” the man replied.

“You wanna throw them in the back of my truck?” I offered.

“YES!” they replied.

The twine was quickly undone (it wasn’t holding anything in place anyway) and the panels were tossed into the back of my truck. The man offered to tie them in place with the twine, but I already had my moving straps out and had the panels locked into place within a matter of seconds.

The guy was honest about where he lived. We drove a couple of miles, hopped out, and unloaded the panels in the front yard. On Sunday his dog had knocked down their fence, and until he could replace the panels the dog was being chained to a tree. While the man and I carried the panels, his wife went in the house, got a bunch of their extra Halloween decorations and gave them to Mason.

And that was that. The man said that Lowe’s wanted $70 to deliver the panels and that they simply didn’t have the money. It didn’t cost me any money and only ten minutes out of my day. Karma +1.