I’ll be honest, nothing brightens my day more than people being nice. Sorry, I’m a sap. But when you think about it, sometimes it’s hard to treat other people kindly simply because we’re all so wrapped up in our own little worlds. I have to remind myself that I have no idea what’s going on in the heads of the people who are next to me in traffic or walking so slowly when they’re in front of me. Something really difficult could be happening in their lives, leading them to disregard me and my needs.
I’m not going to dwell on that too much, though, because today I want to focus on strangers who have gone out of their way to be nice for no reason at all. They certainly didn’t need to, but out of the goodness of their heart, they expressed kindness and made me smile. So here is the first of hopefully many shoutouts to the sweet strangers we encounter each day.
This one goes out to the woman working the drive thru at the Krispy Kreme near my house back in Houston. My mom, my sisters and I had just left Target, and we saw the “Hot Doughnuts” sign lit up as we started pulling out of the parking lot. Of course, we had to go. So went to the drive-thru, ordered a dozen doughnuts, and pulled up to the window.
When we got to the window and got our box my mom looked back at the woman and asked, “Are these hot?” The woman working there politely told my mom that the fresh doughnuts wouldn’t be ready for another ten minutes so the ones she’d handed us were from the last batch they’d made earlier. But my mom, a little confused, pointed to the conveyor belt behind the woman and asked, “then what are those?”
That comment could have been taken very badly. My mom was really polite about it, but if I were that woman, and a customer was being as picky as we were, I would’ve lost my patience pretty quickly. But instead, she just turned around, saw the conveyor belt full of warm doughnuts, and immediately smiled.
“Awwww shit! Let me go get you some.”
She went, grabbed a brand-new box of (actually) hot doughnuts for us, and handed them over to us absolutely free of charge. We now had twice the doughnuts we had paid for.
I never got her name. I only saw her those 2 minutes, and we went away to live our separate lives. Nonetheless she made our day so much better. She didn’t have to go out of her way to treat us so nicely, but she did. That random act of kindness reminded me that there really are good people in the world. Shout out to her, and hopefully her kindness inspires you like it has inspired me.
I want to hear about sweet strangers in y’alls live too! Keep me updated, and let’s do this again sometime.