As the saying goes, “no good deed goes unpunished,” which a West Yorkshire, UK woman learned the hard way when she recently tried to buy a homeless man a meal. Mother of two Claire Varin stopped in a Halifax town centre McDonald’s for breakfast one morning when she spied a disheveled, unshaven man with a backpack sitting at a table by himself eating ketchup right out of the container.
After watching the man eat ketchup for about 10 minutes, Varin assumed the worst, and figured that the man was homeless and starving and had just come in to the restaurant to get out of the cold. Good Samaritan that she is, Varin decided to take action and went up to the counter and purchased a meal for the man. She says that she then took the food over to the man and placed it in front of him, saying, “This is for you.”
‘He didn’t say anything to me when I gave him the food. He just looked confused. I thought maybe he was shocked but I didn’t think anything of it at first.
‘I felt fantastic and my heart swelled that in some small way maybe I had helped this man.’
And she probably would have gone about the rest of her day feeling super great about herself, except for what happened next.
‘As I was leaving, a member of staff walked past with me with his order and gave it to him, apologising to him for the delay.
‘I couldn’t believe it. I was so embarrassed. I just left the store as quickly as I could so I don’t know whether he touched the meal I had bought him at all.
The way I can see it, one of two possible things happened here. Varin bought a meal for a man who actually was homeless, and who had scraped together enough money to buy himself breakfast and then he got double breakfast.
Or on the flip side of the coin, Varin bought a meal for an otherwise functioning member of society who was dressed like a vagrant and sitting by himself eating ketchup, in which case, get it together, you ketchup-guzzling weirdo. Either way, I don’t think she should feel bad about what happened.
(Via The Daily Mail)