Hey Team,

It was looking pretty dicey for a while there. I showed up in West Palm Beach without any kind of plan and with no place to stay. What was I thinking? Excellent question. If I come up with an excellent answer I’ll let you know.

Regardless, a couch surfer swooped in at crunch-time and saved me from trying to find a nice soft spot on the ground to sleep on. Thanks, Rusty.

Now I’m in the middle of learning a very important lesson. I’ve been amazed over and over again how generous people have been on this trip. They hear my story and they leap forward to help in any way they can. It’s no secret I’ve been consistently floored by the kindness of strangers. That being said, I’ve been hung up on six times already today (but only three of them were the super impolite kind).

It seems people aren’t nearly as inclined to help if:

1. I don’t speak to them in person

2. The meeting isn’t a chance encounter

3. It’s not their idea to help

So, I seem to have wasted the better part of my day calling up dive shops and offering my help doing grunge work and my less than impressive writing skills/PR in exchange for some help crossing #28 off the list. Lesson learned.

I emailed a handful of dive clubs that impressed me with their online presence but if nothing comes of that then I’m pretty much at the end of my rope in West Palm Beach and I’ll just have to move on to greener pastures tomorrow morning. (How I manage SCUBA diving in a green pasture will be interesting to see…I would think achieving neutral buoyancy in a meadow would be tough.)

All right, wish me luck.

I’m done.

Brett.

Welcome to the wonderful world of the kindness of strangers:

Why NOT be a kind stranger?

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This entry was posted on Saturday, September 29th, 2007 at 8:58 am.