Have you ever had one of those days where your day wasn’t going so well, and then something comes along and becomes the icing on the very yucky cake?
Whelp, my newly developed cold/sinus infection/RSV was already going to potentially cause me to miss the first week of my new nephew’s life and his mommy’s birthday.
Don’t you just love when you can’t breathe out of your face?
Love it.
Anywho, I was standing alongside a busy street. I needed to cross it to get to my parking garage. Was I standing at the assigned cross walk for the parking garage? No. That was way up the street. My car wasn’t parked on that side of the parking garage – it was parked near where I wanted to cross.
Well, the traffic had died down for a second, and I decided to high tail it across the street huffing and puffing all 20 feet of it. Feeling a sense of accomplishment I realized my coat wasn’t zipped. October had decided to make it’s presence a few days earlier, and it was a bit chilly outside.
As I reached for my zipper, that is when I noticed it.
My badge and all of my other “badge buddies” were no longer connected to my UK badge holder.
I spun around on my heels fearing the worst.
My 3 ID badges, my important phone numbers list, and numerous other things were littered across this busy road that I had just run across. Oh and it appeared that the drivers were trying to make sure that they ran over every.piece.
And that is where I stood, for approximately 10 minutes trying to decide whether to risk my life to gather them or just to call it a day. I probably looked quite pitiful. I was on the verge of tears, regretting the fact that I didn’t just use the cross walk.
Lost in my thoughts, I barely noticed the group of people that were gathering on the other side of the street. They caught my attention when one of the eight pointed at all the badge paraphernalia, but I couldn’t hear them over the roaring engines of speeds toping 15 miles per hour. With a slight pause in traffic, all of them scurried to the middle of the road and picked up the quite ran over items.
Wow.
These wonderful people could have easily ignored my plight. I would like to have believed that I would do the same thing, but it was dusk and there were a lot of cars on the road.
I thanked them all profusely.
“My badge always comes apart at the most inopportune times too,” said the organizer of the rescue mission.
It is moments like these that I am grateful for the city I live it, the country I live in.
It was just last week when I child – A CHILD – was run over in China twice, and ignored for over ten minutes by 18 people before someone stepped in to pull her to safety. She passed away yesterday, due to her injuries.
It was just a few badges. It would have been a headache to replace, but it could have been done.
Thank you bystanders.
… And now to pay it forward…
