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Comment by jbm | Hacker News Reader

You said it.

Quote:

Dayhoff, his boss at Crab Shack, read the story on the Times website and found himself outraged by unsympathetic comments posted by some readers.

"I just can't get over some of those people reacting the way they did," he said. "This guy was a human being. He might not have meant something to somebody else, but he was like family to us. He meant something to us."

Meanwhile:

Jeff Lackey, who lives across the street from Mr. Smith's address at Hollywood Park, recalled one of the rare conversations Mr. Smith initiated.

"I was coming back from the Dumpster and he invited me over," said Lackey, 53. "He said, 'Jeff, I've worked at Crab Shack for 10 years. I never got a raise or a Christmas bonus. I never even got a card.' "

Yeah, I'm _sure_ he was appreciated in life. /s

TL/DR: Actions speak louder than words.

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Not really making a political statement either way, but I've been very surprised at how much small gestures can mean in some situations, and how relative status is.

About 5 years ago, some fellow grad students and I had a fairly recent Guatemalan immigrant serving as the janitor in our part of the building. It was basically awkward all around: the janitors normally came in late-ish to vacuum and empty trash cans and such, to avoid being there when most of the employees were, but grad students, especially in CS, work pretty random hours, so we were often there at 11pm or whatever. The guy spoke no English, and none of us spoke more than about 30 words of Spanish, but somehow given our life positions, none of us were comfortable totally ignoring another human who came into our area (I imagine some people are more used to doing so). So there was always this awkward attempt to say hello and make smalltalk, which mostly ended up in Spanish because the grad students knew a tiny bit more Spanish than the guy knew English.

He actually seemed pretty happy about that interaction happening at all. At some point, though, we ended up collecting like $200 and a card for Christmas (perhaps we felt a bit guilty that he came around emptying trash and vacuuming while we were doing a mixture of procrastinating on Bejeweled Blitz and maybe sometimes writing papers), which he found amazingly surprising. From our perspective it was quite strange that we were capable of making a gesture that made someone surprised/grateful, because I mean we were poor grad students, which in our context was a low-money/low-status occupation.

Thank you _delirium. When I arrived to the US 12 years ago one of the many jobs I did was preparing hamburgers and cleaning bathrooms at a McDonald's. Although I had attended college back in my country of origin, my English skills were quite poor. As a consequence, most people used to ignore me. Many times I felt people thought I was stupid because I couldn't communicate properly. A few other people, though, opted to interact with me. These small interactions helped me feel intelligent and closer to the dream I had of understanding US society and becoming a more productive member of it.

Random acts of kindness like yours probably have an effect much larger than what you can imagine at the moment. Their compound effect in the lives of others and their families make them, literally, priceless.

That's awesome. Good on you and your friends for treating a hard working man like a human being. I'm sure it dramatically changed his perspective on all of you as well.

Hopefully! Honestly it was probably 90% his doing as far as making a connection goes; grad student + cs geek does not make for the most outgoing group of people, and it wasn't like we were actively trying to foster understanding between cultures (we were pretty happy to be getting our stuff done and not hassled). But this guy was super friendly and it was basically impossible not to make some small talk in return, and then to want to do something to acknowledge him. So I could perfectly well see it turning out much differently if the other guy was also a shy/reserved sort of person and didn't make the main initial effort.

Random acts of kindess... evolution at its best.

I like this story a lot. People are people, and it's always nice to be reminded.

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