A short lunar new year story
I'd like to recount a short story from recent days. I was selling a computer display that I no longer wanted, and had arranged to drop it off to the gentleman on our way home for the lunar new year celebrations. It turns out that he owns a scrapyard and, after we'd dropped off the screen and finished the bank transfer, as a throwaway comment my wife asked him if he had an instrument cluster for our old Ford. He sent somebody off, and a few minutes later the man returned with two specimens, one with white dials, and one with black. We asked how much, and he waved the comment aside suggesting we should just try them both out and post the unused one back to him.
We've been driving with intermittent speed and fuel dials for some time, so we felt very fortunate in having a chance to replace them. The yearly checkup required here for cars doesn't test such things, so we'd just left it, being told that it's not worth it for such a tired old vehicle.
Immediately we contacted our mechanic, and as it wasn't yet 3pm he asked us to go straight over. We did so, and within 10 minutes he'd replaced our broken old white dials with swanky "new" black ones.
Asking the young man how much, he replied that it only took him a few minutes, so no payment was necessary. We were ecstatic; two such pleasant surprises in one day. "Only in Taiwan", I beamed, as we drove away at a steady verifiable 50kph.
In all, a very auspicious end to the outgoing lunar new year, and an important lesson for us both that, despite a few months of recent stressful bad fortune, good things also happen all the time. It's just that, as human beings, we have a tendency to remember most the bad, and put the good to the back of our mind.