Do drunken strangers deserve rides home?
I consider myself a very nice guy. I’ve helped old ladies cross the street. I’ve tried to get connections to hook friends up with jobs. I’ve even given stranded motorists a little cash without asking for anything in return.
But I try to avoid giving drunken strangers rides home. A couple of weekends ago, I got cornered into it.
Around 3 AM, I was hanging out at a fine establishment when an inebriated gentleman told me his friends had ditched him and he needed a ride back to his home in Stamford, about 10 minutes away. I happen to live in Stamford, but I felt uncomfortable putting some random dude in my car. He could have a knife, a gun, anything! So I told him I was going in the other direction, and he ignored my sensible suggestion of calling a taxi.
About a half hour later, I took off from the bar solo, having driven myself. I was on the road leading away from the bar when I received a phone call from my friend. We’ll call him “Q.” Here’s how the brief discussion went down…
Q: Are you on the highway yet?
Me: Yeah I am, just got on. (I wasn’t on)
Q: Aw man…there’s a guy here, his name is Steve and he’s a criminal attorney from Stamford. He’s really drunk, and his friends ditched him. Can you give him a ride back?
Now, Q didn’t know I had already ditched the guy, and I was already on the road out! My conscience got the best of me though, and I wound up going back to give Steve a ride. It only took me 30 seconds to turn around, so that was no big deal. He also turned out to be sane, just drunk, and gave me no problems as I dropped him at his place. Still, I never would’ve gone back had I not been asked. The next day, after some mutual acquaintances informed Q about how he put me in harm’s way by asking me to do that, Q called me to make sure my head wasn’t in a freezer somewhere because of him.
So the whole incident proved at least one thing: questionable decision making isn’t limited to the intoxicated. General rule always tells us to take care of the incapacitated, but I’m not so sure I’d do that again.
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A criminal attorney should have enough money (and sense) to call a taxi. This is how people end up in ditches. A guy who drank too much is not “incapacitated” – he is drunk. It’s possible his friends ditched him for a reason. I don’t get the whole aversion to cabbing it.
Glen, were you brought up with a lot of guilt? Nobody deserves a ride home from a perfect stranger.
Q is a schmuck huh? Lemme ask you this Glenn…who’s the bigger schmuck? The schmuck who made the call and had no plans on taking that man home, or the schmuck who actually came back to pick him up?
Let’s also not forget the so called schmuck took a car service back to Stamford from Manhattan, but made sure it went 45 minutes out of the way to take the idiot to Queens as he held his head out of the window, while the idiot was drunk and not feeling to well.
hahahahaha
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