San Francisco
Ten years ago, I was pretty much at rock bottom.

My attempts at going for it by ditching my 9 to 5 job in IT and becoming an international superstar dj had cost me my marriage, my home, and thanks to a nasty drugs habit, my sanity. I was seriously depressed, and literally down to my last tenner. The only good thing I had was running my little club night that survived by dint of a free venue and some great friends who would come to the club, every month, regular as clockwork, sometimes from hundreds of miles away.

One particular night, the regular crowd was down, including Steve, a project manager by day, dj by night, and sound bloke 24/7. He takes me aside during the night and says

'Listen, Lumpy, me and some of the boys have been invited to Dj in San Francisco. Its going to be awesome, but it just wouldn't be the same if you weren't there. If I sorted you out a ticket and found you a sofa to sleep on, would you come?'

I cried.

I had felt so low up to that point, so utterly directionless and lost that I had no idea how to pull myself out of the tailspin that I was in. Steve gave me something that I hadnt known since the world was young - something to look forward to.

I accepted his wonderful offer, and realised that I would need some spending money for the trip so that I didn't have to sponge off anyone for drinks and food. I got myself a crappy temping job in an office, and started getting a little cash together.

The trip came around, and four of us flew out. I'd managed to get some sofa space with a dj friend who lived out there. In Pacific Heights. In an enormous house in one of the best locations the city had to offer. The place was owned by an artist who rented rooms out to up and coming creative types who needed a warm friendly environment to work. The house was filled with paintings and sculptures and kindred spirits, happy to share food, time and stories.

When we played at the club, the brits absolutely tore the arse off of the place. My own contribution was small, but it was so much fun seeing the locals literally run into the room to hear us play. At the end of the night, the promoter came by and passed us all envelopes. Mine had almost the same amount of cash in it that I had scraped together for the trip. I was gobsmacked - i'd expected to play for a few beers.

The rest of the week was a flurry of random, raw experience - having a pass made at me by another dj, visiting the museum of comic book art, getting sunburned in November, making a pilgrimage to Hunter S Thompson's apartment where he wrote his book on Hells Angels, paddling in the sea by the Golden Gate Bridge whilst watching pelicans fly overhead, a shared lunch in an Armenian restaurant, buying vinyl at Amoeba records, and many many beers accompanied by many many laughs.

This trip turned my life around. From here, things just got better and better.

Ive never had the chance to pay Steve back. Whilst still good friends, we don't mix in the same circles any more, and I haven't seen him in the flesh for years. I'd like to think that he knew that his incredible act of kindness probably saved my life. One day, I hope to help someone out the way he helped me.

Apologies for length, but it just all poured out.
(djlumpyrulesok beware of cousin Mosquito and his solo, Fri 21 Nov 2014, 23:17, 13 replies)

It's pretty minimal, but counts I guess
Every Friday arvo when I leave work, I go through the local McDonalds to enjoy a 50 cent ice cream cone. I like to give the cashier $5.50 with the instructions to give the next ten people through the drive through a free ice cream cone if they want one. Been doing this for some months now, and the one and only time someone from the queue behind me caught up and managed to give me a cheer, it was a road crew truck full of yellow hi-vis vest wearing workers, each raising their ice cream cones to me from the next lane as they flew by me. Made my damn day, actually.
( Shazzoir Old enough to know better young enough not to care, Sun 23 Nov 2014, 10:09, 10 replies)

A Sunday morning knock on the door...
...turned out to be a man delivering the original hand drawn, hand-coloured plans of our house, which was built by his grandfather in 1911.

He was moving and had found them in his loft, so rather than throw them out, he thought they should remain with the house itself and drove for quite a way to bring them to us. We framed them and hung them in the living room for many years.

When we moved, we left them for the new owners.
( Amish Information Systems hates misplaced, commas, Fri 21 Nov 2014, 17:41, Reply)

Nice
My son spent the first 2 months of his life in hospital, 4 weeks in intensive care. A passing nurse saw me fumbling for change for a coffee after 6 nights without sleep. She stopped, saw my eyes and just hugged me.
Didnt help the fear but did make me feel it was posible to keep hoping.
My son's 7... the nurse visits where we live from time to time; I try to repay her by letting my son know what she did...
Nurses are just the best.
(DustyD, Wed 26 Nov 2014, 23:30, Reply)

I tried to help, and it seemed to work for a while.
A few months back I got a message from Karen [not her real name], a former colleague I'd worked with closely for a few years. We always got on, and worked together well, and stayed in vague touch on Facebook - although we hadn't seen each other for 5 years. She's a few years older than me, and she and her husband have three kids - two of them have flown the nest, their youngest is now 16 and still at home.

The message suggested that all wasn't well, and it took a couple of days for her to blurt out what was wrong. Things had got really bad with her husband of 25 years, and she intended finally to leave him - but he'd taken away her bank cards, and she had no money and no-one else to turn to and nowhere to stay, and could I help her out?

I was a bit shocked by this appeal for help, but this was someone I got to know very well when we worked together, and who I trust completely. For all I hadn't seen her for 5 years, I still considered her a friend, and there was no way I could turn her away. I told her I'd put her up in my spare room if she needed, for as long as she needed. We made tentative arrangements for her to turn up at the weekend, because she didn't want to leave home while her husband was there.

As it turns out, my hospitality wasn't needed. She turned up at my door on the Friday and told me that she'd left home the evening before, after her husband had held her by the throat in the bathroom when she returned from a shopping trip. When she threatened to call the police, he smashed her phone against the coffee table. So she left that night, and was staying with a (female) former colleague. She thanked me for my offer of hospitality, but said that this was for the best - her husband would be suspicious and jealous if he knew she was staying with a man.

At this point she was trying to organise a new bank account, so that her wages didn't go into their joint account (she was the breadwinner of the couple for all the time I knew them). She had no money and no way to access money, so I gave her all the cash I had to hand. I tried to insist that there was no need for her to pay me back, but I knew - and I know - that she will insist on paying back every penny I gave her.

We stayed in contact for the next couple of weeks, while she got stuff organised. She was having a tough time with everything - the kids were coming to terms with their parents separating in different ways, and (understandably) they weren't finding it easy.

It was her 45th birthday two weeks after she left home, so I offered to cook her a meal and have a few drinks with her to allow her to get out of the spare room she was staying in. We watched some films and drank some wine, she slept in my spare room, and I gave her a lift back to her temporary home the next day.

It wasn't until later that she thanked me for being a "perfect gentleman", and then told me that she was attracted to me and hadn't felt like being the perfect lady.

We talked about it, she explained that she'd had the hots for me for a while. I was quite taken aback by this, because I had no idea. We'd worked together for years, but I'd never noticed any suggestion of sexual chemistry. I tried to let her down as gently as I could, and said that even if there was a mutual attraction there (which there wasn't), the time to act on it was not 2 weeks after she had left her husband of 25 years and was relying on me for help.

She accepted it well, and we agreed to keep our relationship on a "friends" basis. I put it down to emotional stress and confusion on her part, and the fact that she might misinterpret someone showing her some kindness after many years being starved of it.

I backed off a bit after that, which might have been a mistake on my part. She needed my help, but maybe I wasn't able to help as much as I could have.

She got a flat a few weeks later, and I helped her out with the deposit and helped move her stuff in. Everything seemed to be looking up: she'd got all the financial stuff sorted out, she'd been meeting up with all her kids and talking everything through, she'd got her own place. Her husband was being a complete uncooperative arsehole, but you can't have everything. I went over to her flat after she moved in, she cooked me dinner, we had some wine and we talked about everything.

A couple of weeks later, she texted me to tell me that she was sorry she hadn't been in touch but she'd had a lot going on. She'd ended up talking to her husband for three days, and then she ended up in hospital after taking an overdose. She'd lost the deposit on the flat because she'd only been there a few weeks, and was back at home (with her husband) because the doctor didn't want her to be on her own. In the same text, she said she felt she'd let me down.

I replied that the last thing she'd done was let me down - I'd let her down, because I had always thought of her as being so strong that it had never occurred to me that her situation might be so bad that she'd get to the stage of taking an overdose.

I tried to be nice to someone who came to me looking for help. I don't think I would change anything I did, even knowing what I know now, but it didn't work.
(Plague Hedgehog 'posting crap', Sat 22 Nov 2014, 0:55, 6 replies)

One of the nicest things that anyone has ever done for me was to have sex with me, so some highlights below that I would like to thank (in no particular order)
The 40 year old French woman who seduced me when I was 23 (taught me a great deal)

The one night stand in Gran Canaria who introduced me all things shaven & the joys of baby oil.

The 26 year old size 10 with a natural 30FF chest for (two) obvious reasons

The married woman who would only have bum sex with me (as that apparently didn’t count as cheating on her husband)

The one who claimed she couldn’t perform oral on me as it was too big (not true but a nice ego boosting way of saying no)

The next door neighbour who regularly visited me for late night “booty calls” for 3 years – regardless of if I had a partner at the time or not

The boss’s PA who regularly used to drag me in to the loos at work for a quickie (that certainly brightened up the working day)

The American girl who I got back to my hotel room within an hour of meeting her - for her general slutishness when I had been in a drought

The nubile 19 year old who used to wake me up with a BJ – what a perfect start to the day!

'Gill' from off topic and possibly others (but not Kitty) helping me get over a bad marriage breakup

To those & the others… THANK YOU

Length joke? Too obvious…
(Mr Udagawa, Sat 22 Nov 2014, 13:37, 15 replies)

I have developed a habit of giving away vehicles...
I know that sounds odd, but it's happened the last two times that I've moved country.

The first one was in 2009. Mrs. Ryushin and I were just about finished packing up our lives to move out to New Zealand, and about the only thing we'd not got around to getting rid of was our car.

It wasn't anything special, being a 2002 Renault Megane diesel. It sounded like a tractor, and cost me about 3,000 pounds when I'd bought about a year earlier. Mind you, I'd promptly sunk about an extra grand into putting things right with it (engine problems, mostly), and then one morning on my way to the office, I hit (and killed, upon inspection) a little deer as I was navigating a B road somewhere outside Newbury. So, it was looking a little dinged and wasn't worth a whole lot. Oddly enough, it was about this time that my sister's car (which was actually a hand-me-down from my folks.) finally coughed its last breath and had to be retired. The timing seemed fortuitous, so I offered to let her look after our car until we got back a year later.

The only thing is that we stayed in NZ for over 4 years, so they ended up driving that little Renault into the ground (they put 100k on the odometer, and I gave it to them with 80k on it, so pretty good going.)

The second time was about a year ago. Mrs. R and I were moving to Amsterdam from New Zealand, and again, we didn't get around to selling the car. We had a very nice, but completely dull little VW Bora, which was serving nicely as a wee family car. Moving all our stuff was proving to be stressful enough without worrying about the car, so we found a good home for it and asked them to look after it for us for a year.

We are moving back to NZ at the end of December, but I've just found out from the family that we gave the VW to that they are expecting a second child, so I think we won't bother asking for the car back.

In Amsterdam, we didn't buy a car. We have a pushbike, which someone has just recently expressed an interest in.
(Ryushin, Fri 21 Nov 2014, 21:25, 3 replies)

about 6 years ago
a week before i was due for surgery, my mates and i were meant to be going out for a drink. we stopped off at their house so i could drop off my clean clothes for the next day(i'm never in a fit state to go home after a night out with those two!).
walked into the living room to a huge shout of "SURPRISE!"
fuckers had thrown me a surprise party, just because i was going into hospital.
they're mad, but i love my mates :)
( Smash Monkey lowering the tone of the whole internet, Sun 23 Nov 2014, 15:31, 5 replies)

I took my daughter on holiday once.
She steadfastly refused to have a good time and didn't even come back with us.

Last time I'm going to Portugal.
( .Yeti., Fri 21 Nov 2014, 19:38, 8 replies)

Look - a little kitten:

( Je suis un vagabond is an unfunny, up your own arse middle class knob, Sun 23 Nov 2014, 13:50, 5 replies)

My frozen willies have all melted

This is why I mourn ice things
( broadsword now that's fresh, Sun 23 Nov 2014, 12:52, 2 replies)

The neighbour's cat got stuck on my roof
It's a friendly cat who likes being stroked and picked up so me being nice I got some ladders to fetch it down.

The ungrateful bastard scratched my arms to fuck in the process then ran off as soon as it was down.
( thistle, Sat 22 Nov 2014, 18:51, 1 reply)

Here's a nice pearoast from 2007
www.b3ta.com/questions/conned/post94268
(BeatsWork, Fri 21 Nov 2014, 23:10, 1 reply)