I helped someone today!

Get this, I was at the grocery store just a little bit ago. On the way in, I saw that they had a BBQ pit outside with a sign that said one should pay inside the store then come out and get ones tasty BBQ'ed treats. Who knew that this BBQ Pit would enable me to help someone - more on this later...

Anyway, so I made haste into the store! After I bought the basket full of frozen foods that were my original intent, I bought a ticket for two hot dogs.

We had been having a cool-wave this summer, which finally broke today - it is 20 degrees warmer than the rest of the summer (ie 93 outside right now, rather than the 72 we had been having). So I rushed to my car, dropped off my groceries, then was rushing back to get my hot dogs... and that is when it happened!

A smartly dressed woman pushing a baby carriage walked up to me and said, "Pardon me, but could you help me?" I was so taken aback that I stopped. I waited to hear what it was that she needed my help for! Maybe she needed directions, ie she was lost. Or maybe she needed to know the time. Or maybe some other simple thing I could say to solve her problem before I got my hot dogs and my groceries melted.

And I kept waiting. At this point, I realized that she was either going to ask me for money, in that she was a scammer, or she needed honest help of a larger magnitude than I could supply at that time. Since she knew what her problem was and she was willing to stand there for 10 or more seconds staring at a stranger waiting for an answer, she must have thought that the solution would require more than 10 seconds to solve. So, even though I didn't know the exact nature of the problem, I knew what she considered the duration to be - very long.

Either she was going to have to spend a long time trying to convince me to give her money, or it would require a lot of grunting and sweating on my part - neither of which sounded good at that time.  So, I said, "No" and walked on to get my hot dog. I couldn't believe how much I helped her! If I hadn't be going to that hotdog stand, I would have missed an opportunity.

The end.

I know, some people may be asking for the punchline - "but Edward, where in the story did you help her?  She asked you for help, and you said No!"  But that is where I helped her.  Evaluating her situation, I knew the outcome.  She would have either tried to scam me, which would have been a waste of my time and hers, or she would have spend a lot more time explaining the problem to me with me in the end not doing what it was that she wanted.  Either way, she wasn't going to get what she wanted from me, so by saying No as quickly as I could, I gave her the freedom to find someone else who would be more capable of helping.  Just because I might have been the first person she asked, I definitely wasn't the best person to ask.  By the time I had my hot dogs in hand, she was nowhere to be seen, so she must have found someone to do what she wanted.

Also, I couldn't help her.  What she was really asking was if I would do something for her, not to help her.  And since she didn't tell me in her opening remarks, she obviously thought that my initial reaction to her request, if I knew the full details, would be No.  Since she was trying to bait a trap, I felt that I never really could help her in the grand scheme of things, so I would at least help her by giving her more time to find someone else - someone on whom the trap would work better.

I was just happy that I answered the question correctly!

The Edward