Imagine this, you have been driving on the road for eleven hours. You are traveling south back home from your hometown where you visited your family for the holidays. The trip should take about fourteen hours, but because of traffic, and a two-hour delay, you are still five hours from your house. When things start to go a little crazy.
In addition to bringing a few christmas presents back with you from Louisville, you and your wife are also bringing back a cold, the flu, or something in between. You also have your dog with you, who is just there for the ride.
How do things go crazy?
Well, at this point your battery alert light comes on the dash of your car. You say lets not stop the car, (stupid me) and lets push it and see how far we can get. It is now dark, it is starting to rain, and your lights on the speedometer and GPS all go out, and your car starts to sputter a long. You pull over to the side of the road driving and hoping to push it to the next exit off the highway. And you don’t make it.
It is now completely dark, the rain is coming down even more, your car doesn’t have any power, and you are sitting on the side of the road about five or so hours from home.
This is the situation my wife and I were in last night. Not a very fun situation. Luckily we had roadside assistance with our insurance provider, who we immediately called and was able to get a car towing service scheduled to pick us up.
Then as luck would have it, my wife called about six or seven hotels in the area to see what their availability was at this late hour. It is around 8:30 pm at this time. A few had rooms available, but would not allow pets. Ugh. She eventually found one that would accept pets.
We now have the towing service on its way, a hotel room secured, and I knew where I was going to have the car towed to.
Now we just sit for the next hour. The car is cold, the cars are flying by at 80 and 90 miles per hour less than 10 feet or so away from our car. The rain is coming down harder, and our dog is going a little wacky in the backseat at this point.
The towing service guy gets there, his name is Kenny. Kenny was coming from a wreck that required his services before he could get to us. He gets there, and says to me, “This is a dangerous place to be.” I said “You think”. No, I didn’t say that, I am not an ass. But I wanted to.
He immediately started hooking my car up, and asked for my wife and the dog to get out of the car and get in to his truck. His truck was so warm.
We get the car on the back of the tow truck and we are now on our way.
Kenny asked us what we were going to do that night. And were we able to find a hotel room. We told him yes and he said that he would drop our car off and then take us there.
He didn’t have to do that, but he insisted. When we got to the dealership to drop the car off, my wife knew exactly what we needed to do, because she had talked to DJ already, and he was expecting us. We dropped the car off and headed to the hotel with Kenny.
Kenny dropped us off at the hotel, and my wife and I both slept like babies last night.
This morning I got up and in this small town, Uber is a new thing. I was a little blown away by that, but nonetheless, because of that, there aren’t very many cars in the area and the hotel doesn’t have a shuttle service.
As I am talking to the service person at the hotel front desk, the assistant manager, was eavesdropping on our conversation where I was asking her to call me a cab. Yuck a cab. But that is all I had.
He said “Where do you need to go?”. I told him, and he said “I am about to get off of work and I can take you over there.” I said that would be awesome.
Zack and I get into his Jeep and made our way over to the dealership where we dropped the car last night. I meet with DJ, who my wife had talked with the night before.
DJ and I talk and as of right now we are waiting to determine what is the problem with the car.
So often we hear that people are not as nice as they used to be. Or in my case, I was complaining about customer service at a fast food restaurant just yesterday.
Between last night and this morning, my wife and I ran in to three very friendly people who were willing to help us out in a time of need.
The cynics out there are saying, “That is what they are supposed to do aren’t they?”, I agree. However, how you do it and the way you help people matter. They put themselves out a little, to help us even though they didn’t have to.
Most people aren’t willing to inconvenience themselves for themselves, or the their own family most of the time. And they definitely wont inconvenience themselves for someone else.
Kenny, DJ, and Zack did exactly that. They were willing to inconvenience themselves to help out complete strangers a little more than they had to.
I am not sure how this little unwanted adventure will end. They way it sounds, is that our car needs a new alternator and one has been ordered and will be here sometime this afternoon. So our fourteen hour drive will turn into a 48 hour drive, that included a few twists and turns, but those twists and turns reminded me that I need to be willing to inconvenience myself at times for others, just like Kenny, Zack, and DJ did.
To your success and your future.
Pennies into Fortunes 
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