Singapore — With so much bad news these days, some good news about the kindness and decency of strangers is always welcome, as one man has found out.
Mr Julius Ho’s Dec 31 Facebook post about a ComfortDelGro taxi driver has gone viral, getting shared over 2,200 times.
He wrote his post because “I strongly feel that we should share our experience”.
He and a friend used the ComfortDelGro app to book a trip from Kallang Wave Mall. A cabby by the name of Mr Lim Hong Herng took the booking.
Mr Ho said that, on arrival at their destination, Mr Lim got out of the taxi and offered to help them with their groceries even though they could manage them.
There was nothing much to say about the trip. After they had alighted, however, they discovered that one of them had left a hand phone in the taxi.
“We panicked.
After desperately calling your hotline and being on hold for more than 5 minutes, we decided to head up to the apartment so that we could use an online app on a laptop to find the phone and make it ring and also using the one phone we have left to call the lost phone.”
Mr Lim answered immediately and, even though he was far away, he said he would return to where he had dropped off Mr Ho and his friend.
The cabby arrived so quickly that they had to run to him. He handed them the phone but would not accept the S$50 they tried to give him as a reward or thank you gift for his quick response.
Mr Ho pointed out that this experience was different from those in the past when drivers asked for payment for having driven back, “sometimes before driving to the owner of the phone as if holding the phone as ransom”.
This cabby, he wrote, “made his way back to us as soon as possible (we could see from the tracking app), returned our phone, and refused payment. He refused to accept even a lower sum of money. This went on for a few minutes and after a spirited back and forth, we conceded that he would not accept a cash reward for returning the phone that we had carelessly misplaced”.
Mr Ho added that it has been recently difficult for taxi drivers because of the pandemic as well as the rising number of private hire vehicles, and acknowledged that in a way, they are indebted to Mr Lim.
“I am sure Mr Lim has suffered some loss of income and maybe even anxiety over the challenging year that is 2020. And yet he refused to take any form of cash reward for returning our phone.
“In fact, we owe him. His petrol/diesel it took to drive back to us, his time which could’ve been used to do 1 or more trip(s), the fixed daily rental of his taxi, time he could have spent with his family.”
He ended his post with words of praise for the cabby.
“It is heartwarming to know that even in these sometimes bleak times that there are angels amongst us. Mr Lim if you see this, I want you to know that you are generous and a truly decent human being, and you made this ending of 2020 more sweet than one could hope for. I wish you a blessed life!” /TISG
Read also: 2 babies born in Comfort DelGro taxicabs in the same week during CB