Now that the “disgraceful things” thread in IMHO seems to be ensconced in common knowledge, I think it only fair to present an opposing notion.
I just read an item in the Huffington Press about a man and his daughter who were sarved at an Olive Garden restaurant somewhere in Illinois. At one point while being served, the child happened to say to the waiter that her grandfather’s house had burned down. 
As it turned out, the restaurant declined to charge the man and his daughter for the meal.
The matter apparently went viral and–well, long story. The point is that a place like Olive Garden did something really nice for someone in this situation.
I also remember a time when two or three young people, who may have been evangelical Christians, helped me get gas when I ran out on a busy street, some distance from any gas station. When I had put the gas in the car and looked up to thank them or pay them, they had disappeared.
Got an example of such largesse? 
Way back in my cash strapped single-parent days, I went one Sunday morning to hit the grocery store for a few staples: bread, milk, diapers, eggs, etc. Loaded up the young one and stopped at an ATM on the way to check my balance. It said I had something like $22 in the bank.
Went to the store, collected maybe $15 in items and the machine wouldn’t take my card. I protested and the cashier pointed out another ATM and suggested I check it – $4 in my account. No idea where the discrepancy came from but I had to apologize and leave empty-handed, wondering where I’d get what I needed until I got paid.
Out in the parking lot, I heard a woman calling out “Sir! Sir!” and stopped. A nicely dressed lady, perhaps in her 40s, had my groceries, having seen it all go down and paying for them after I left. I thanked her and asked if I could repay her but she just said she had been there before in her life.
That was some twelve years ago now and I still tear up a bit relating the story.
When I was in college, a bunch of us were hanging out in someone’s dorm room. And for some unknown reason, we were all really hungry, but didn’t have the presence of mind to do anything about it. There was a knock at the door, and it was our friend Jerry. He had a pizza. He didn’t want any of it, he just got it for the rest of us.
That was over 30 years ago and I still remember it.
I think I’ve mentioned this before but I always bring it up as my “faith in humanity” story.
Years ago we were on a vacation in Spain and realized hours later that about 10 postcards we had filled out to send to different friends and relatives in the US we had left on a bench at a local park.
When we got back home people were thanking us for the postcards. Someone had found them, paid for all the postage, and mailed them.
This is kind of a lesser thing:
On my last birthday I met a friend at a restaurant. She let it slip to the hostess that we were both celebrating our birthdays that day. Then we sat down for the 7-course meal. The last course was dessert, and they put candles in it and the whole staff came over to sing to us.
This is kind of a greater thing:
We could have taken public transportation home. Instead a mutual friend picked us up and chauffered us both home. She went waaaaaay out of her way to do that. That was probably a 3+ hour drive for her.
I ran out of gas right in front of a fire station. All the firefighters helped get my car into their lot, then ran around trying to locate a funnel and a gas can to put gas in my tank. (A couple days later I brought them a cake to say thank you.)
When I had to have emergency surgery, and my baby was 8 months old, a bunch of ladies descended on my house with bags of breast milk for her. One friend came with just one little bag of an ounce or two and *apologized *that it wasn’t more. My older daughter’s kindergarten teacher came over with a casserole, too - just having heard from my 5yo what was going on.
I used to listen to Dr. Joy Browne, and she suggested when you’re washing your hands in a public restroom, you pump out your own paper towels, then pump out some more for the person behind you. Every time I’ve done it people seem astonished at my niceness, and we both walk out feeling happy!
I think I’ve told this story before, but what the hell.
My mother died six & a half years ago. I wasn’t with her that morning, something I’ve always regretted, and for one reason or another I never had the chance to be alone with her between then and the funeral to get the emotional closure I needed. But the cemetery in which we buried her was near my office, so after I got off work on the Monday after the funeral I went there by myself, only to be unable to find the grave. A perfect stranger who, it developed, visited his own mother’s grave once a week saw me, intuited my problem, and helped me find it, then hung around out of sight until I was finished. He gave me both the privacy I so desperately wanted and the support I needed afterwards.
Great guy, that.
When I was down-and-out and homeless in NYC, I use to collect coins from the street, go into a cafeteria and get a cup of coffee, then take leftover food and eat it outside. One day a person handed me a bag with a breakfast platter and two sandwiches in it.
Much later in my life, I was sitting in a park dressed in my “unmade bed” fasion, a full cast on one arm, eating bread and drinking coffee. A person came up, put a bag and a big 7-11 coffee on the table, said “This is for you” and left before I could say “Thank you.” The bag had two hero sandwiches, a big bag chips and a twenty dollar bill in it.
People can be so nice.
I’m lucky enough to live in a region where nice strangers abound. Heavily pregnant women, families with bratty kids, anyone with a cast, crutch, cane, or overloaded arms gets moved to the front of the grocery line. Strangers help people who have run out of gas or have a flat. Every cash register has a tray full of change for people who are a bit short and stray animals in traffic usually have a group of people flagging cars and chasing the mutt/cat. There’s a price to pay, though, because gratitude and a little small talk are expected during these transactions, so shy people or people in a big hurry sometimes seem put out, but overall the pace is slow here and small courtesies are the norm rather than the exception. The last couple months of my pregancy I was treated like royalty. I keep up my end of the deal by smiling and returning buggies as I walk in every store, letting people go in front of me, and make a habit of complimenting as many strangers as I can for whatever awesome features, apparel, or habits I notice. I always run errands and shop on Tuesdays/senior citizens discount day so I can reach all the high shelf items and bend down to get the low shelf items and help them load the trunks of their giant Buicks.
For Christmas I bought my best friend, AKA the sweetest person on earth, 10 folding umbrellas and attached a “FREE” tag. She’s waiting for April showers to distribute them on nasty days. She’s already planned to leave them at bus shelters in our town; I expect I’ll be chauffering her on the first stormy day this month. Sunday I’m climbing the fence to get to her new office so I can plant a shepherd’s hook and bird feeder outside her window because she complained that all she can see from her windows is the back of a huge billboard.
Wow, Troppus, where do you live where everyone is so nice?
Annie, that’s awesome. I have a homeless friend. The first time we had lunch together, she bought picnic items with money she clearly did not have. Good stuff too. And the second time she bought luch because it was my birthday. I really don’t like seeing her pay and will grab the check as often as I can, but people give so much to her (she is very well-loved by a lot of people), she hates taking and taking and taking. And for someone who has nothing, she is awfully generous.
Many years ago, I used to commute from NW Indiana to Chicago on the Southshore RR. Now, being a surly chick and all, I never talked to fellow commuters. However, one evening I was sitting next to a man I had never seen before who started up a conversation and we ended up talking all the way to my stop. Friday of the next week, I stayed out late downtown and caught the last train home (12:30am) and slept past my stop. The conductor woke me up several stops past in the middle of nowhere - one of the smaller stops that was just a basic station (closed, of course) on the side of the road. Had I been thinking straight, I would have stayed on the train until the end of the line in Michigan City and gotten a hotel room for the night but I was so disoriented from being just awakened (and from beers imbibed) that I got off the train. There was no phone booth and I didn’t have a cell phone way back then so I was essentially hosed. Suddenly, I heard a voice say, "Surly? and I turned and saw the man I had been talking to the week before. It just happened to be his stop and he happened to be on very last train that night too. He drove me home, 40 minutes out his way, and refused to take any money for it. Weirdly, I never saw him again but I’ll never forget him.
Southern Virginia. It’s possible you have to grow up here to appreciate the slower pace; some of my friends and coworkers from larger cities and northern climes find the expectation of small talk and witnessing pretty tedious. My sister, impatient by nature, gets pretty antsy when every quick trip to the store turns into cocktail hour, but I love strangers and don’t mind the chatter at all. The area welcomes tourists and any local hearing an accent is liable to engage the speaker in twenty questions, and that game can seem pretty invasive to people use to conducting their business anonymously. However, if you are traveling here and something goes wrong, you can bet that someone, usually many someones, will step in and help you out.
I moved my kayaks yesterday and stopped for gas while they were on my car. I was trapped at the gas station and the Walmart parking lot for half an hour answering questions. “Isn’t it too cold, do they tip easily, do you fish, who goes with you, what kind of paddle, I used to have blah blah kind of boat, etc”. That kind of thing would drive a lot of people mad, but any attraction is an occasion to converse. It’s pretty conservative here, and I’d prefer more progressive and open-minded neighbors, but I’m pretty content with the general friendliness of my home.
My father should move there. He’d love it. But I don’t think that mom would like it!
In addition to the one mentioned in the OP…there are two others currently in our local news.
The first, a woman had a sticker on her car mentioning her husband being overseas in the military. Someone left an envelope on her with a thank you note and cash to take him out to dinner once he got home.
The second, a teenage girl with cancer made a bucket list, and one of the things on her list was to go to the prom. So everyone set up a special prom for her…except when it got closer to the date she got sick and went in the hospital…so they brought the prom to her, and made her the prom queen. The pictures of everyone in the hospital all dressed up were amazing.
In recent memory there was the grandmother working as a school bus monitor that was bullied (and videotaped) by some jr high school kids. They posted the tape on the web to make more fun of her…which backfired when the general public came out of the woodwork showering her with donations.
And a personal story…way back when I was in college I had a part time job working in the cafe. One day I found a wallet sitting on a table way back in the corner…so I grabbed it. I opened it to get the name of the person and there was quite a bit of money in it (for someone in college). It felt so great when I tracked her down and returned it to her. Yes all the cash was still there. 
There was another recent news story about how the staff at a particular Chili’s was ready and willing to fix a “broken” hamburger for Arianna, a little girl with autism. She was excited about going out to eat and readily ordered her own cheeseburger, but didn’t want to eat it when it arrived because it was “broken” (the staff, following their usual practice, had cut it in half to make it easier for a kid to eat). When the family told their waitress about the situation (and offered to pay for a new burger), both the waitress and the manager made a point of apologizing directly to the little girl and explaining that they were bringing her a new, non-broken burger and some extra fries to make up for it (at no charge). Arianna was so happy to see her new burger that she kissed it a few times.
My daughter is handicapped. She had a small collection (one or two) close friends in high school, but she was never the social butterfly. Being a kid who gets around on either crutches or in a wheelchair is not exactly conducive to popularity at that age. It was especially exacerbated by the fact that my son (her able-bodied twin, but attending school a year behind her), being an extremely popular kid in school – from freshman year on, he was the lead in every school play, got mostly A’s, clubs, parties, the whole gamut. So right up until graduation, my daughter never had anything good to say about high school, or the people in it.
Then at graduation, when her name was called and she wheeled up on stage, the entire student body rose and gave her a standing ovation. Made me cry like a little girl. Fuck, I feel a tear forming right now.
My parents were moving from Ca. to Md. All their stuff was packed onto the truck and gone. They were driving themselves across country, taking their time and stopping at places along the way. Someplace in the middle of Missouri they stopped at a small town and had lunch at a diner. Got back into the car and drove away. Mom didn’t notice until that night she no longer had her purse. Luckily dad had his credit cards etc. They had traveled hours and several hundred miles and figured it was long gone. Fast forward about 2 weeks. Getting settled into new home a package arrives, with her purse and everything, including the cash, still in it. Somebody found the purse in the restroom and mailed it back to her address in Ca., probably using her drivers license for the address, and the USPS then forwarded it to their new address. No note, nothing indicating who sent it on to them.
Damned leaky tear ducts. The price of getting older, I guess.
When I was 12, my Mom–who had divorced my Dad, who had gone bonkers–was making ends meet, supporting herself and us three kids, my older brother, me, and my younger sister. We moved out of a city-owned housing project inside Los Angeles City into Lawndale, about ten miles away. Before we officially moved, Mom had used a phone booth near where the South Bay Galleria is now. She accidentally left her purse in the phone booth. Her wallet was in it, with the rent money–$195, in 1961–in it. She was beside herself with worry and anguish. Some man living in Manhattan Beach found the purse, and got it back to her with the contents intact, including the money. I don’t know if she even found out the guy’s name. And I don’t know what we would have done if the money had not been recovered.
I’ve had multiple drivers of share taxis try to refuse my payment of fifty USA cents(the standard fare for the route) saying that I was obviously in a lot worse shape than they are. I’m not, and they did the work they deserve the money.
I hate it honestly. 