A couple of years ago I bought an old Brooks leather seat/saddle for my bicycle ( donno, 30-50 dollars IIRC). I met up with the seller at my lunchbreak close to my office.
Seller arrived on bike, took the seat out of his backpack showed it to me and told me about how many years he had used it. He was a very likable person, so we started chit-chatting a bit and it turned out that he pedalled from a town 120km away to bing me the seat, for a 240km roundtrip.
At this stage I invited him for lunch and we talked a bit more … after a while he told me that he once “hand-delivered” (=pedalled) a bike he sold from Valparaiso to Punta Arenas.
For all of you not too familiar with Chile, I put that in this world-map (purple line) …
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Turns out, that person rode his bike for roughly 4000km to deliver it to the new owner!!!
Have you met any extraordinary (non-famous) persons in your life?
We were in a local brewery and my gf overheard a guy talking about restoring someone’s Victorian home’s porch. It caught her attention because we were trying to find a contractor/carpenter to restore a big shed we had. Everyone who came to give a quote was eager to tear it down and replace it, as restoration would cost more.
We ended up hiring “the guy” that night and he did a beautiful job on the shed, and also rebuilt our dock and boathouse.
He’s a character. He gave an initial quote that seemed way too low. I looked over his math and found some errors, but the real problem was he was just figuring out cost of materials. There was no labor involved. I helped him redo his estimate.
Last night he came over just to say hi (and to look at the next project my gf wants done). He brought a mix six and we sat out on “his” dock.
I was at a museum that had (among other things) a collection of some rare computers, including an Apple Lisa and a NeXT. I was chatting with a rather elderly gentleman who worked there, and he mentioned that he had been a journalist in the computer field, and every time Steve invented something new, he’d send him one. He also talked about going to his first job interview after high school with his friend, and classmate, Bernie.
Jobs and Sanders, respectively.
Also, in high school in about 1982, one of the Iranian hostages lived on my paper route. He gave a talk at my school about his experience. Not a household name, but I found his obituary a few years ago on the New York Times website.
