Acts of kindness can soften the blow of a rotten day

It’s time again to ask you to share moments of kindness you’ve experienced. Let me start by sharing my own recent experience.

 

The Thursday after this year’s July 4 Monday holiday, I was running an errand to look for an inexpensive desk chair for someone. None of the local stores had any in stock. Instead, I decided to check to see if the Habitat for Humanity ReStore, which sells donated items, had any in stock. I made the drive, parked in the lot and looked around the store, but I didn’t find any office chairs.

 

When I got back into my 16-year-old truck that had just passed state inspection the week before, I turned the key in the ignition and absolutely nothing happened. I kept the hood up so AAA road assistance could find me in the ReStore parking lot. One of the volunteer workers at ReStore came out to tell me I could wait in the air-conditioned store if it got too hot outside.

 

Over the course of the 45 minutes or so it took the first AAA person to arrive, three different customers saw my hood up and offered to give me a jump if I needed one. I thanked them but told them AAA was on its way, which it was. When its representative arrived, it became clear it was not a battery problem, since the battery seemed fine.

 

“Likely a starter issue,” the AAA rep said. So he called for a tow truck and I called the service that had worked on the truck in the past to make sure we could tow the truck to its lot.

 

“You can bring it in, but we might not be able to get to it until next week,” the receptionist told me, pointing out how busy they were after the July 4 weekend.

 

Two hours later the tow truck arrived, brought the truck to the auto service lot and dropped it off. The manager of the service took my information and then walked out to the truck to take a look and listen with one of his mechanics.

 

“If all it is is your starter, we’ll try to fit it in this week,” the manager told me.

 

The following morning, I got a call letting me know the problem was a corroded wire to the starter rather than the starter itself. They also changed out the terminals on my battery, which showed some corrosion. Parts ran about $36 plus a couple hours of labor.

 

Those several hours of inconvenience I hadn’t anticipated included several moments of people showing genuine kindness when it would have been far easier to ignore me. Granted, my mechanic was doing his job and elevated my loyalty, but he easily could have put off the work for a week and sold me more than I needed and I likely wouldn’t have been the wiser.

 

When I have the opportunity, I like to believe I do the right thing by showing the same type of kindness to those in need.

 

Now, it’s time for you to share some acts of kindness you’ve experienced. Tell me who and where you are and email your stories to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com. I will try to share some of your stories in the weeks ahead.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Is it OK to retrieve discarded plants from a dumpster?

There are dozens of gardening groups on Facebook. A reader we’re calling Violet belongs to several. On one, Violet recently read a post from a member that recounted an experience in the garden area of her local Walmart. Violet shared the post and the subsequent comments on the post with me.

 

The poster was looking for some hosta plants to fill in a new garden. A worker there was clearing some “half-dead” plants and told the poster they were not for sale. When she asked him what plants he was referring to, his responded “all these” and motioned to all the plants in the area where he was working. She figured there were about 30 hosta plants, many of which were “decent-looking.” He told her the plants were to be thrown away and were already out of the store’s inventory system.

 

“What a shame,” the poster wrote. “I wish I had the nerve to go dumpster diving in the morning.”

 

It was the poster’s final comment that led to a heated discussion.

 

Some posters warned her that the plants might be diseased and she would be foolish to retrieve them.

 

Another asked: “Is it stealing if you take something that’s getting thrown out? I never actually would, but still ...”

 

Still another recounted her own experience at a different store when she inquired about soon-to-be discarded plants. “I was told they could not let me buy or take them as that would be stealing and I would be prosecuted,” she wrote. “Some really stupid policies if you ask me.”

 

Violet asked me if it indeed would be wrong to take discarded plants from a dumpster if she happened upon them.

 

I am not a lawyer specializing in trash, but it seems fair game to take something if it is clearly disposed of as trash and that trash is in a public area. Many cite the U.S. Supreme Court case of California v. Greenwood as support for this stance, even though the case didn’t specifically involved disposed plants. The case is often cited as support for the legality of some cases of dumpster diving.

 

There are, however, important limitations. If the trash is on private property or the receptacle in which it is dumped is clearly labeled private property, then taking anything might cross into the category of theft. There are also variations in the legality of removing trash based on specific municipal regulations.

 

In the case of the post on the Violet’s gardening group, the likelihood is that the plants were to be disposed of in a dumpster on Walmart’s private property.

 

It seems a shame that Walmart couldn’t find a way to at the very least add the dying plants to a compost so they could prove useful if they chose to no longer sell them. But if Walmart disposes of them on its private property, the right thing would be for Violet or others to ask permission to retrieve any discarded plants. The store’s management might not prosecute if someone retrieves the plants, but if the store says “no,” Violet and others should take the response as an indication to let the hostas lie where they’ve been tossed.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.

Seek the right questions to ask before assuming you have the best answer

 A former editor of my column once suggested I regularly step back and tell readers what informs how I think about ethical issues I write about (in 24 years you cross paths with many good editors). My sense is that he believed such disclosures would provide a certain level of transparency with readers about who I am and how I think about stuff. Gayden was always a strong, supportive editor who is largely responsible for me writing The Right Thing column as long as I have even though he has not been my editor in more than a decade.

 

Occasionally, I have mentioned in the column that sometimes when people find others to be unethical it results from coming at ethical decisions from different approaches to ethical thinking. One group might embrace a rules-based approach to ethics where the belief is that if a rule can’t be applied equally to everyone, it’s not ethical. Others might adhere to more of a utilitarian view, seeking the greatest good for the greatest number of people. It’s clear that people belonging to either camp might find the other viewpoint to fall short of what they believe to be ethical behavior. Sometimes when we disagree with others it’s not because they are unethical. It’s that they view the world differently.

 

Over the past couple of weeks, we have experienced events that have resulted in many people searching for answers about issues they view quite differently. These events were preceded by a couple of years of the pandemic regularly placing us into unknown territory when it comes to seeking answers about how to stay healthy, show concern for the health of those around us and adapt to new ways to continue staying connected.

 

The past couple of weeks of reports of mass shootings, Congressional response to gun control, Congressional hearings on the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, and U.S. Supreme Court rulings on gun ownership and reproductive rights have elevated a collective search for answers that is increasingly loud and varied. A regular scan of social media suggests that many people believe they have the precise answers that might make some sense of all these events and affect a desired change.

 

In his most recent novel, Yonder, former colleague Jabari Asim writes beautifully and often harrowingly about the plight of several enslaved people (whom he refers to as “Stolen” in his book) on a plantation in 1852. In one scene from the book, one of the Stolen, named William, is speaking to another named Ransom, who is a Black preacher.

 

“You’re supposed to have all the answers,” William says after finding Ransom’s advice wanting. Ransom chuckles and responds: “I don’t even have all the questions.”

 

Answers such as term limits for legislators and Supreme Court justices may prove fruitful in the long run, but they will not result in immediate relief from many of the issues people are facing. Recommending short-term solutions to address the challenges that lie ahead also seems sound.

 

But at times when so much is in flux and the stakes seem high for so many, it strikes me that the right thing is to continue to try to find the right questions to ask before we assume we have the right answers. Only then can we hope to find some reasonable way to help protect those with whom we live.

Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.

Do you have ethical questions that you need to have answered? Send them to jeffreyseglin@gmail.com.

Follow him on Twitter @jseglin.

(c) 2022 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. Distributed by TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.