After observing meetings and interviewing muftis in various provinces I always have a lot I want to write down, but my laptop battery doesn’t last long and I have one of those lemony MacBooks that likes to shut down randomly. This usually leaves me scrawling notes on a legal pad that I have to type up later - not very efficient, especially with my crummy handwriting.
Today I was on a bus coming back to Istanbul scrambling to type as much as I could before the battery conked out. I reached a point when I thought I should switch to paper because the computer might shut off at any moment, so I put the laptop back in my bag. The guy next to must have noticed because he leaned over and said, “Excuse me, I have a computer you could use if you need to work.”
I said, “Oh no, I couldn’t do that, but thanks!”
He asked, “Are you a businessman?” (Thanks, necktie!) I told him I was a grad student and gave him some info about my project. He told me he thought I had some important work I was trying to finish by the time we reached Istanbul, and that’s why he had offered to let me use his laptop. I said, “Well, it’s something like that, because I need to write down as much as I can before I forget it.”
Whereupon he asked again if I wanted to use his computer. He insisted.
It dawned on me how helpful this would be, so this time I didn’t say no. He got out his 15″ Acer, changed the keyboard input to English so I could type by touch, handed it over, and promptly dozed off for the rest of the trip.
Meanwhile, I proceeded to type 2,369 words right up until we reached his stop, saving to my flash drive as I went along.
Call it what you will - generous, foolish, irresponsible - I’m grateful to the guy. I got his name and email address, so the least I can do is write him a thank you note. Any other suggestions? Maybe I’m just supposed to pay it forward.
6 comments ↓
i love stories like this. i think a thank-you note and spreading the good karma when chances arise would be a good way to go?
Wow! Who is this guy? Maybe we should bombard him with thank you notes! Is is possible that he just doesn’t realize how rare that kind of behaviour is in the rest of the world? Incredible.
He was a computer science university student who had just finished taking his finals. I told him people just don’t do what he did and he kept saying it was nothing.
It is interesting. I must admit that a similar thing happened to me recently. I gave my laptop to a women in the Madrid aiport a month ago , she needed to connect wireless urgently. We were already inside the tax free zone and I bought from the starcbucks wireless for 1 hour. She was sitting on the next table. I noticed that she was typing quite fast and all of a sudden her computer went-off. She tried but couldn’t turn it on. She looked very depressed, she asked the boy in the coffee shop whether there was a cyber cafe around. As he said no, i offered her my lap-top and the rest of the internet credits that i have bought. She accepted happily and used my laptop around an hour while i was drinking my coffee and reading a magazine. She complained a bit about the danish keyboard. She said that she had bought additional an hour of online internet (using her credit card on my computer). So i could use this additional hour if i needed.
it is like I trusted her , she trusted me. She was a woman around her 40s. Would you enter you credit card info on someone else’s lap top? In a cyber cafe?
I don’t know if it is generosity, foolishness or irresponsibility. But it felt like it was mutual. And I never thought for a second about “probable” negative consequences of my act. I want to say that the boy in the bus had genuine trust in people. That is something very familiar and something that i have missed a lot.
Thanks for writing this story Jim.
By the way, it has been almost a month since the airport case… I haven’t had a problem yet.
I want to make a disclaimer, before adding a few lines as suggestions.
Well, I wrote the comment above very quickly, under the pressure of dissertation defense in a few months and the feeling of heavily homesick. Nowadays, although i know such a thing might not even exists, i miss the collectivist, trusting, helpful and hospitable people of Anatolia deeply. Now i read what i wrote and found it embarrassing. What was my point? i don’t know… I guess sometimes one can foolishly trust one person and the other one also trusts you in another way. And ultimately, it is very sad that we get surprised with such behaviour… I don’t know… I should think more before typing the first thing came to my mind on your blog…
Ok. Suggestions:
You should definitely write him a thank you note. And if i were you, i would add my contact details at the end of your note and tell him that if he wants to a have coffee or pass-by he is very welcome. I wouldn’t offer anything financial.
Even though he must have expected nothing from you, such note would be a clear sign of vefa (I don’t know exact translation of it and online dictionaries are doing really bad job on this word). And i am sure that would make him happy.
take care..
Thanks a lot for sharing your story, Berkay. I don’t think there was anything embarrassing about it all - actually quite the opposite. And if there was someone else I know who I would expect to do something similar to what the guy on the bus did for me, you would definitely come to mind!
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