Sometimes
it’s nice to step back from the rush of day-to-day business and take a minute
to appreciate some of the happier things in life. The news is filled with scandalous affairs,
geopolitical tensions, imminent financial doom and so much other negativity that
sometimes it’s nice to observe the happier things that life sometimes bestows
upon us.
Two such
incidents happened to me recently that I’d like to use this platform to share:
First, a
few weeks ago my aunt and uncle vacationed in Florida, driving down the
Atlantic coast for two days. When they
arrived, my aunt realized that she had lost her purse. It contained her wallet, cell phone and other
personal items. They scrambled to think
about where she could have lost it and when she phoned the McDonald’s in South
Carolina where they had stopped for lunch she was relieved to learn that her
purse had been turned in earlier that afternoon. The young man on the phone offered to take it
to the local UPS store, package it up and ship it to her. She gratefully accepted and the next day she
received her purse with its contents entirely untouched. The only thing it cost her was the overnight
shipping, which she gladly paid.
McDonald's: You Get a McTwoThumbsUp!
I found
myself in an eerily similar situation just last week:
I traveled down to Atlanta on a business trip and, on arriving at the
airport on the way home, realized that I didn’t know where my passport
was. What worried me was that I didn’t
remember seeing it at all during my three day trip. Luckily, I had my Nexus card, which allowed
me to get through the border and back into Canada without my passport, but I’d
heard horror stories about lost passports and didn’t look forward to sorting
through that process. As I sat on the
plane thinking about my lost passport I remembered the missed call I had on my
cell phone the previous day … and the message that I had not checked so far …
When we landed I checked my messages to hear that my passport had been turned
in to the Lost & Found at the Atlanta International Airport—the airport I
had left only a couple of hours earlier!
(Note to self: do a better job of checking voicemail messages!) I called the Atlanta airport and arranged to
have my passport couriered back to me with my only cost being the courier fee.
These two
separate incidents show how much good there still is in the world. My passport could have been thrown in the
garbage or worse, used for more sinister means.
My aunt’s purse could have been rummaged through and her identity and
valuables stolen. But in these two cases
the good nature of two complete strangers shone through. It’s nice to celebrate the goodness that does
exist in the world, even though it seems like the mainstream media (CNN, Fox
News and TMZ: are you listening?) chooses to glorify the negative, evil and
depressing events in the world.
To the kind
sole who found my passport and turned it into Lost & Found: thank you for
your kind act and for making the world a better place.
Steve Hartley,
Managing Partner
Fering Communications Inc.
Website: www.feringcommunications.com
