Editing Blog/2024-11-10/A Stranger In The Night (section)

== Night Time ==
 
Last night, [[Julie Yu Kang|Julie]] and I were walking back at about 1 AM from Shreyas's place after a few board games when we saw a lone fellow in a 49ers or Giants cap<ref>I forget which but it was an 'SF' team, though everyone will argue that the 49ers are not a San Francisco team strictly</ref>. It's city policy in San Francisco to avoid eye contact with random people standing at the train station at 1 AM, but I always like a story so I didn't do that. Predictably, the guy asked me if he could use my phone to call a ride back home.

This is the classic scam! You whip out your phone, he grabs it and makes a run for it. And strictly, with my wife standing there holding two pizza boxes, I should have said "No, sorry man" and walked on. That is the sensible thing to do at one in the morning. As it happens, though, I asked him where he lived and if I could just get him a car back.

Unbelievably, he gave me his address, I called an Uber, and the Uber driver took him exactly there and that was the end of it. The poor guy had probably actually lost his phone.

Julie and I have a protocol for how we deal with roadside incidents and whether we stop or just dial 911. But clearly we need a discreet one for whether it's acceptable to help someone on the street. There are a lot of crazy homeless folk here, and I think I've learned not to interact with them. But every so often, there's a normal person in an unfortunate situation and I can't help but be influenced by [[Blog/2024-08-14/Fearless American Women|all the people who have helped me in the past]].