Random acts of goodness
Well! It appears that not everyone in Singapore is heartless, kiasu and selfish. Of course generalizations are never accurate, but if your faith in humanity needs a little bolstering, read on. All this happened to me in the space of 1 hour!
I was buying tomatoes at the supermarket. Just that one bag, because it was the only item my committee needed to make sandwiches. I got in the queue, and the man in front of me let me go in front, saying that I didn’t have many items. He had a trolley with a toddler in the seat, so I supposed that it made sense for him to concede to me. I wasn’t the only one, though. An auntie also got to cut queue. I suppose he was waiting for his wife to pick up some additional items, and didn’t want to lose his place in the queue. In this way he created a win-win situation. And became random act of goodness #1.
And when I got to the counter I had another little surprise. The price of the tomatoes came to $1.04, so I gave the cashier $2.05 so I wouldn’t have so many coins. She gave me back the 5 cents, and I thought she was going to give me tons of coins, which actually isn’t cost-effective for the company. However, it turned out that the price was rounded down to 1 dollar, and not rounded up to $1.05 like I thought. Goody! Okay, so this isn’t really an act of human kindness, but it made me that little bit happier anyway. Even if I only saved 4 cents.
ATM passbook updating machines are quite stupid, in my opinion. They can’t help it, but they are. Sometimes your passbook entries end right at the bottom of the page, and when you next update it the machine gets confused. It tells you to turn to the last printed page, but of course the last printed page is full, and it assumes this isn’t the last one but one of the intermediate pages. So you’re caught in a catch-22 situation, and have to get in line for a human bank teller. Sigh.
But today a stupid machine got around its deficient software. I don’t know how or why it did it, but the machine managed to turn the page, go down a few lines and start printing. So while I have a blank space in my book (I hope it won’t be a problem) it’s saved me a trip to the bank. Yay!
And now that I have Skype, I can make free calls to my friends overseas! Take that phone company! And I live in student residence so my internet bill is included in my tuition fees anyway. Life is good.
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