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Thursday, April 19, 2012

The penny drops

Picking up my eldest from rugby practice - I'd dropped him with his dad an hour earlier. At the time there had been plenty of space to park, (parks, as they say here, just not the green and leafy kind) but when I came back there were no spaces. All three of the disabled spaces were full.
Sigh.
So I parked one man in to see what would happen next. It was a truck, a huge one, and when he came back a moment later I said "Hi, can I just check if you need this space?" He looked baffled and said "But I'm just picking up my son." I nodded and showed him my badge, the penny dropped and he said, "Oh, I see...sorry." And he drove off.
End of conversation, and I thought no more about it. But what happened next wasn't routine. Because he saw me a few minutes later, and I realised that he hadn't just gone home, he'd moved the truck so that I could get in. I smiled - we were a few metres apart - and he came up and said again "Look I just want to say, I'm really sorry." "Look," I said, "please don't worry about it. You probably don't expect many disabled people at a rugby practice." He agreed that he didn't, and we moved on.

I like it when people I have mentally dismissed as selfish unthinking idiots turn out to be actually very nice and have a conscience after all.

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