As always it was getting late and I hadn’t done a random act of kindness yet. I was going out to the Tufts area to do a winter safety seminar after work and as I got on the T, I decided I’d pay for the fare of the person behind me. Previously in this month I’ve paid for people’s T-fares but I’ve never done it getting onto the same train with that person. So this time I was going to try and strike up a conversation with the person. Epic fail!
The guy behind me who I had arbitrarily decided would receive my random act of kindness for the day, turned out to be an almost non-functional drunk middle aged man. He had also packed a lip of chewing tobacco and was spitting into a Dunkin Donuts cup. I knew that he wasn’t homeless because he took out a wallet with credit cards in it and had been fiddling around trying to find his Charlie Card. I then told him I’d swipe him in as a random act of kindness and he grunted some type of approval, spit in his cup, and hustled away from me.
So I didn’t get the warm and fuzzy feeling that I was looking for: doing something nice and then having a great conversation about it with a perfect stranger. Instead I just helped a drunk dude get into the T-station. I suppose that’s a semi-valiant cause considering he was so drunk he couldn’t even get his card out of his wallet (someone should tell him he can just hold his wallet up to the machine and beep it). I doubt he’ll remember it and I doubt that it made a big difference in his life, but it’s the thought that counts.
