A change of heart, brought to us by AOK team members Matt and Nathan:On Thursday, Nathan and I were strolling down the main drag in Mountain View (CA), heading to catch the train. Ahead, an elderly woman approached the curb with an apprehensive shuffle and, at its edge, stared down with concern. With her not-what-it-used-to-be body, the 7 inch drop might as well have been a chasm.Being an avid AOKer, I did what came naturally: I walked right past her.Three steps beyond, I turned around. Perhaps motivated by guilt or the recollection of my grandmother or a sudden spark of mindfulness, I walked back and did what I knew was the right thing (albeit five seconds late).”May I give you my arm?” I asked, minus a top hat.”Oh yes, thank you,” she accepted, “I had no idea how I was going to get down that.” She stepped downward and shuffled toward the open passenger door of a nearby parked car.A few steps beyond, I turned to Nathan and announced without a hint of irony: “now that was an act of kindness!”

Posted in Uncategorized

A tale of two trees, from AOK team member, Ira:The tree out front was long dead. We’d been nipping and tucking our new home to make for perfect – and it really was already the best place of seven others we’d occupied in as many years since moving from NY to LA – so our home improvement trigger fingers were often itchy and at times hasty. When we decided to have the wooden carcass removed we knew that we’d have to use one of our landlord’s “guys”, most of which turned out less than stellar work, but in this case a very nice and generally diligent green-thumbed fella, named Ignacio.We didn’t have a history with Ignacio, however. Some language barriers were present, and I’ll admit, I did more than my part to fail to communicate the kind of tree we actually wanted. That hasty, often distracted and hair-trigger, home-improvement-finger lead me to capitulate to Ignacio’s “foliage as a fence” aka the Privacy Tree theory. And while I would have accepted what had been my understanding of a ficus tree (you know, that braided trunk, artful and sparse extension of branches, type deal that everyone in NYC kills trying to domesticate them for indoor display), the tree that was erected at 6:30am, before anyone had a chance to say “yay” or “nay” to it’s installation, one Saturday morning weeks ago, could have passed for a baby Giant Sequoia. It was huge. It was abundant with leaves. It was a force of nature.I was still in denial when I excitedly tried to surprise the family with our new edition. It seemed like one of those cool things a dad does, that if filmed without sound and in saturated colors could make for part of a montaged commercial for a pharmaceutical drug or, with the brood in matching pajamas, perhaps Banana Republic. But by the time we made it 3/4 of the way on our morning walk for coffee, the tree was destined to go. Of course it was too late by then. The tags were removed. Exchanging it for another tree was not an option. Not Banana Republic indeed. Anticipating we’d take our lumps and buy ANOTHER tree, replant the behemoth out back and incur the added expense of labor, we set out and then promptly failed to find our dream tree.Ignacio however saved the day. Maybe he recognized his part in the matter, installing the tree without first getting our green light. And since he was the “landlord’s guy” not “my guy”, and even if he was “my guy” I wasn’t keen on playing the part of petulant customer by lowering the fault hammer solely on him. So I was expecting and prepared to pay the additional day’s labor fee. But Ignacio did what businesspeople used to do: Make the customer happy. He waived the added expense of uprooting and replanting the tree out back. Kudos Ignacio! An AOK move that I was pleasantly surprised to observe and report!The touch of gray in the silver lining though was that Ignacio had “guys” of his own – employees. And while they showed up for work to do the usual foliage clean up, they undoubtably couldn’t have expected to move the gentle giant today. It didn’t seem fair to me.So, did I act out of guilt or generosity today when I gave them a $40 tip?Is this an AOK confession or an AOK action?I’m not sure..

Posted in Uncategorized