Nice People Make My Day

I am a firm believer in being friendly and nice to people, even - and especially - if you're not sure they're in the mood to be friendly and nice back. Because if you're nice to people, you give them the opportunity to be nice to you, which is just... nice. I had two wonderful 'niceness' moments today, and they improved my entire afternoon (which, until that point, had consisted of riding my bike through exceptionally vigorous winds and driving rain to accomplish the errands I had set for myself).

I went to the post office first, to mail a few letters and a small package. I brought with me a stack of old 39-cent stamps, as well as a bunch of 41-cent stamps, since (heads up, letter-writers!) postage is going up to 42-cents on May 12. I didn't have very high hopes that I would be able to use them all up, but the man at the counter looked amused that I'd brought all my stamps, and said, go ahead, you can put them all over! So he did the calculations for me and I plastered stamps over the entire front side of Heike's package to Germany. As you can imagine, I was thrilled.

After the post office I headed to Next Adventure, an excellent outdoor store where I got a bunch of stuff before I went to Ecuador (because my former co-workers are awesome and gave me gift certificates as a going-away present). My main goal was to check out their bargain bins for a few things and compare prices on others, but also to replace the travel pillow that I oh-so-foolishly left on the plane in Panama. When I got to checkout with my pillow, I started making small talk with the woman at the register, commenting that this was the second such pillow I had purchased from them, since it was such an awesome pillow and since I had oh-so-foolishly left the first one on a plane in Panama. Her response? "Oh, that sucks! Well, we'll give you a discount on this one." Now, how cool is that?

My ride home was much more enjoyable after that, and I even had the opportunity to continue the flow of niceness by helping a frustrated driver find where he was going.

Fellow human beings are wonderful.