The kindness of strangers: I thought my wages would be docked but the customer I'd overpaid returned

The Guardian

25-05-2025

It was Christmas Eve, 1977. I was 20 years old and working on the desk at a credit union as a teller. Management thought it was a wise idea to offer our customers a glass of champagne with their withdrawals that day, so I had been helping myself to a small glass of bubbly as I handed the customers one.
By the end of the day I was unsurprisingly a bit tipsy and, when I balanced up the till, I realised I was $20 short. At the time, $20 was almost a week's pay for me, or at least half a week's pay, so it was a decent amount of money. I was sitting there feeling quite distressed, because if the till was down you had to make it up from your own wages – that was the deal. It meant I would have no money for the Christmas period.
Suddenly there was a knock on the window, and I looked up to see a man who seemed desperate to come in. We normally didn't let anyone in after we'd closed but the man kept knocking, so I eventually opened the door a crack to see what he wanted. When I did, he handed me the missing $20 note – he told me I'd overpaid him, so he'd spent half an hour travelling across town on Christmas Eve to return the money, knowing that my till would be out.
It was a lovely thing to do, and it made a lot of difference to my outlook on life. It wasn't just the money, it was the fact that he had gone to such effort to make sure that I wasn't out of pocket, when it was entirely my fault anyway. The experience also meant that I'd never accept an accidental overpayment from anyone ever again. I know how much that money can matter to people working in retail. And I think if you've ever worked in the lowest end of jobs, you tend to have more empathy.
It's been almost 50 years but I've not forgotten that man's act of kindness. I've learned in life that people do mean things to you sometimes but it's the kind things that really make the difference.
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