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Good deeds and karmic payback

June 06, 2011 @ 08:10 By: gordon Category: General, Out and about

Last week turned out to be a week of good deeds and karmic payback.

starbucks cardI stopped for gas on Wednesday and noticed a Starbucks card on the ground next to the pump. It had a small hole in one corner, so I expect it was attached to someone’s key ring. Sadly, a crack meant the hole was more of a notch and thus not very good at remaining attached to a key ring.

When I got to my destination, I took a picture of it and tweeted a lost-and-found message. I also asked @StarbucksCanada if they could retweet it for me. Their response was:

image

I sent them a direct message with the numbers and a couple of days later they sent me a Starbucks gift card via email. Hopefully the owner of the card had registered it on the Starbucks website so that Starbucks can issue them a new card. Smile

While out at lunch on Thursday I found someone’s building pass. I kept my eyes open but didn’t see them in the area, so I hunted them down with the help of a friend who works in the same department the pass’ owner does and determined that they worked in one of the buildings near mine. I headed over to their building and turned the pass in to the guard who thanked me and commented that the owner had just reported it as missing. They called me back later and thanked me personally, which was a nice touch. I had the same thing happen to me a few years ago and someone working in the same building found it can returned it to me, so there was a bit of karma payback there. Smile

While dragonboating on Saturday, I saw someone in the water next to their C1 sprint canoe about 500m upstream of us. This wasn’t terribly surprising as there was a bunch of C1s on the water and a motor boat with a coach in it scurrying around doing the coaching thing. I assumed he would probably go help the paddler in the water get back into his boat, but I kept my eye on him just in case.

A couple of minutes later we were getting closer to the paddler in the water so I pointed him out to our coach and we pulled up beside him. Our coach asked him if he wanted some help and he said “oh no, I don’t want to interfere with your practice”, which was dismissed by the team. He got himself sorted out by which time the little motor boat pulled up and apologized for taking so long to get to him. The rest of our practice was relatively uneventful and our mock race against the other dragonboats practicing at the end of the session went really well.

Many years ago I was canoeing with a friend and we tipped at almost the same point in the river at the C1 had. Fortunately for us, a passing motorboat fished us out and helped us on our way. It took a while, but I can finally put a tick next to that item on the karma debt list. Smile

Not bad for a week, eh?

3 Responses to “Good deeds and karmic payback”


  1. David says:

    Good job! I always try to return lost items as well; it is a feel good moment for all involved when you can find the owner. I’ve returned phones by texting people in their contact lists and once tracked down the owner of watch.

  2. Gary says:

    I’m still trying to recover my website from an electrical storm a few years ago, kinda wiped me out, the insurance company refused to re-imburse me, so when i have the money & time, i try to fix it a little more… my latest revision is a new.prinet.org, i didn’t like the way the main one looked. Anyway, to make a short story long; I am VERY interested in space, weather, and the likes, and i’m trying to implement a “where the ISS is right now” for my front page. After several days of research, and trying to understand the algorythms used in these SGP4 propagators’, i tripped over an instance were you had contacted T. S. Kelso I believe via nntp.perl.org about you reporting the SGP4 into perl. I use perl almost exclusivly on my website because it is so dynamic and was wondering, did you ever get around to that? Checking your blog, it appears your a pretty busy person and I would understand if not, but if you had, I would be seriously interested in it for my home page ISS tracker. Let me know if you even remeber *heh*, that was back in 2000. Thanx for taking the time to read my letter, maybe we can colaborate again.
    -Gary
    P.S. I think it’s commendable returning peoples property, especially cameras (with pictures), and I could have lost my laptop once at a motel if it hadn’t been for their good moral judgement. I think the biggest thing I have ever been able to return was a wallet, and go figure, they gave me the $20 that was in it…. The world needs more people like that.

    • gordon says:

      Hi….

      I do recall communicating with T.S. Kelso and he said I could port his SGP4 propegator to Perl, but unfortunately I never got around to doing that. I haven’t looked at embedding something like that in a website, but I’d think there should be some sites out there that offer something like that that you could embed in a website.



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