Punk'd?

meant to write this blog last night, but I got distracted with laundry, life, and “words with friends” (my new addiction) and eventually wound up falling asleep – lights on, laptop on, everythang LOL. Hey, I had a long day.

Anyway….

So last night on my way home from work, I realized I only had $5 cash on me. I was going to a store on my way home that had a card machine, but I was gonna spend $3 out of that $5 just getting home and end up having no real money on me. When you have school age children who are notorious for springing “I need $__” things on you last minute, you learn to always keep a few dollars handy. I also wanted to buy some discounted bus tickets and they only accept cash.

So I stop at an ATM before I left the subway and took out $40. I go up into the Port Authority and wait in the short line to buy my $20 worth of tickets. I tuck them in my wallet, tuck my wallet back in my bag and turn my iPod back on. On the way to my bus gate, a guy calls out to me, asking if I speak English. I nod, stop, and remove one of my ear buds so I could hear him. Looking around, I couldn’t imagine he had trouble finding another person who spoke English, but he singled me out so hey, whatever.

He just starts going a mile a minute and I had no idea WTF he was talking about for the first minute he was talking. He’s showing me this paper with all this yellow highlighting and I realize he is telling me that some social service agency helped him get a job as a chef at some Marriott in Jersey, and this paper is his way of proving it to me. He’s also telling me the job pays $19/hr, more money than he’s ever made and he is tired of working for $10/hr LOL. Yes indeed, he was talking to me like we went way back LOL. I still wasn’t sure what he was getting at, I mean, I was sure he didn’t stop me just to tell me about this new job he got LOL but he wasn’t getting to the point. So I just ask him; “Ok, so what are you asking me?” Now he’s telling me what church he goes to (LOL) and how the people at church sent him off with $20 or $25 to start his job, but when he got to the Port Authority, he found out the ticket to Atlantic City was $39.

Ok, now we’re getting somewhere.

At that point, I understood – he was asking me for money….. money to supposedly get him to his first day of work on time. “I don’t wanna risk losing this job over something so stupid as not being able to get there,” he says. Made sense to me.

Now there were a lot of questions I could have asked, and I woulda been well within my rights to ask them, being that I didn’t know this man from a hole in the wall, but I really didn’t see the point. I mean, quite honestly, I didn’t even hear anything else he said after that, and he talked for another two minutes, easy. There was no way I could determine if he was really telling me the truth or not. The highlighted paper coulda been a fake, along with the poorly done resume it was stapled to. His fast talking coulda had more to do with crack than his being Hispanic and so what he didn’t look like a chef? I mean what does a chef look like anyway? LOL

The bottom line is that I would never know, but the 1% chance that he could have been telling the truth sent me into my wallet for that other 20. Even if he was lying – and I realize the high likelihood of this being the case LOL – he singled me out to ask for help, and like I said on my FB post last night, I was always told that if someone comes directly to you for help, you should help them, because it could be an angel – or even Jesus – testing you. If its within your means to positively affect a situation and you don’t…………… feel me? I mean, I aint rollin in it like I was a few months ago but regardless of what was REALLY going on, that dude clearly needed that $20 more than me. 48 hours later, that 20 would be gone and I wouldn’t even be able to tell you what I did with it. So why not help a brotha out? If I hadn’t, I woulda wondered about that shit all night long, losing sleep about whether or not I did the right thing and Im just now getting shit back right – I don’t need karma fuckin wit me LOL At the end of the day, I still went home with just that $5 in my wallet, but if 20 bucks is the going rate for peace of mind these days, Im peeling off that bill every time.