[Cerek the Barbaric]

You'll be amazed at how good it makes you feel.

Here are some suggestions:

1) Let somebody get in front of you at the checkout line - especially if they have fewer items than you.

2) Do one of your co-workers mundane tasks for them (make some copies, send a fax, etc).

3) Let your friend/brother/sister beat you when playing a game.

4) Stop to help a stranded motorist. (This is one of my favorites).

Something I used to do would be to go into the arcade at the mall and play various games. Several games will give you tickets based on your score that you can redeem for small prizes at the counter. I would play until I had a long string of tickets, then I would give them to the youngest person I could find in the arcade. Their faces would light up brighter than sunshine.

You also never know when you will reap the rewards for your acts. My second year in college, I was washing a load of clothes in the dorm laundry. When the wash cycle was done, I looked for a dryer. We only had two and both of them had clothes in them -- but one of them was finished also.

There was a table in the laundry room and the unwritten rule of thumb was that you could take somebody else's clothes out of the dryer if they weren't there and there clothes were dry. Normally, you would just set them on the table and leave them there, but I decided to fold the clothes for the owner. It took my roommate and I about 10 minutes to sort and fold this guys' clothes and leave them on the table.

I had no idea who owned the clothes and didn't really care to. I had just done to surprise whoever it was.

One year later, another one of our friends moved into our dorm and I got to meet his roommate, who knew my roommate also from some classes they had together. We were up in their room one night and I told them about folding the clothes for some unknown person the year before.

My friends roommate stared wide-eyed at me and then started laughing. I said "What's so funny?"

"You're not going to believe this," he said "but last year, I had left a load of clothes in the dryer downstairs. I got busy and wasn't able to get back down there to take them out. When I finally did go down there, I found all of my clothes neatly folded on the laundry room table."

Needless to say, he and I became pretty quick friends after that.

[ 06-05-2002, 12:14 PM: Message edited by: Cerek the Barbaric ]