One Good Turn Deserves Another

I was driving home buzzed late at night at the end of a vacation. I stopped at a Speedway in New York to get some food and drink to balance out the alcohol. I bought an extra large fountain drink, a rice krispie treat, and two calzones from the grill. The girl working the counter only charges me for the fountain soda and rice krispie. I said to her, “You forgot to scan the calzones.” She said, “Don’t worry about it.” So I got over $7 of food for free. It felt weird to be walking out of the minimart with something I didn’t pay for.

The next day I stopped at a Sheetz in Ohio. I grabbed a bottle of water, a bag of cashews, and an extra large fountain drink. At this particular Sheetz, a girl who I had been friends with for years was working. (To make a long story short, she got involved with some drug dealing thugs post-high school and got a criminal record. She could only get shitty jobs like Sheetz and supplement it with spicy content on OnlyFools.) It turns out I got to Ohio about a week too late, she had already quit or got fired when I asked one of her co-workers if N***** was working. The cashier only charged me for the nuts and gave me the water bottle and fountain drink for free, which amounted to close to $4. I asked him, “Don’t you want to charge me for the drinks?” He said, “Don’t worry, I got you.” Was he just a nice guy or did name-dropping his porno-filming ex-coworker help?

The following day I was in Illinois. I ran out to McDonald’s to buy lunch for coworkers. I got everything in the order, but the workers gave me a free caramel frappe that I didn’t even order. I told them they made a mistake with the frappe, but they said it was their treat. With the way things had been going, I wondered if I stopped at the titty bar after work and bought a few lap dances, the dancer might give me top for free.

Free food and drinks three days in a row? Was this a case of hourly workers not giving a fuck or karma?

Let me note this: The day preceding the events of the aforementioned three days, I was in a grocery store buying cases of beer for the last blowout day/night of vacation. Ahead of me in line was a family trying to buy chicken, a bag of vegetables, and a couple other items that looked like dinner. Their credit card was declined. It might have been maxed out. They didn’t have enough cash to buy the items. They looked sad and were just going to walk out of the store without the food. Softy sinclair didn’t want to see the family with kids go hungry, so I told the cashier to just charge their chicken and sides to my credit card. It ended up being somewhere between $20 and $25 with tax. I told the family, “You don’t have to thank me. Just pay it forward when you are able to.”