You may recall that yesterday I made dinner for a local family going through a difficult time as the result of a recent tragedy. As part of that dinner, I baked one of my specialties - homemade chocolate chip cookies. Since I was making them anyway, I decided I might as well make a larger batch and use them to thank a group that is often unappreciated - the police!
Today I went over to the Moorestown police department and walked in with my plate of cookies. When a woman at the front desk asked me if she could help, I explained that I wanted to give the cookies to the police to thank them for their work on behalf of the citizens of Moorestown. She said she'd have to go find an officer and promptly disappeared behind a closed door.
Five minutes later, a smiling sergeant emerged from the door to accept my cookies. He wondered if I had called ahead and knew he was there because he happened to be a total fanatic about chocolate chip cookies! I mentioned to him that too often people just complain about the police and that I wanted to say "thank you" instead. He couldn't believe that I was bringing them in and he seemed so genuinely pleased by the gesture. He couldn't stop smiling and he knew that the other officers would be equally thrilled.
Once again I was struck by how such small gestures, especially when unexpected, can have such a huge impact. It's definitely fun to create these experiences for people.
That works! To take a tired joke to another dead-end spot, I wonder what kind of response you would have received if, instead of cookies, it had been home-made donuts? :> I gave a can of soda and ice in a cup to a sweaty, underpaid, non-native-born grass cutter on a hot summer day. My thanks from a cow-irker was, "Thanks, now he'll stay here". Sounds like charity is lost on the latter poor soul.
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