Look, 2016 has been pretty rough, whichever way you cut it. Sometimes it’s nice to read a story that has no sadness and one particularly happy ending.
That’s exactly what happened when Terri Colachis’s daughter Shea, who is on the autistic spectrum, lost her iPad on the way back from school. Normally, that’s exactly the sort of thing you don’t want to happen right before Christmas, but thanks to one persistent stranger, it has an uplifting ending.
Long story short, Shea’s iPad had gone out of the window of the car on the way back from school. Normally, after losing an iPad on the side of a road, you’d write it off and go buy a new one — which is exactly what the Colachises were planning on doing. However, just a few days after the accident, they received an email.
It came from the editor of The Mighty, a site about disability and mental illness. Terri had contributed to the site in the past, and using the name written on the iPad and some Googlefu, the stranger who picked up Shea’s iPad had tracked down the site and contacted the editor, who contacted her:
“He said he was walking along the side of the road not far from his office and saw it lying in a gutter. Shea’s first and last name were written on the back with a Sharpie. It was very worn so you could barely read it. He Googled her name and came across an article I wrote for The Mighty a year or so ago, and tada!”
Of course, Terri ran over to the guy’s workplace straight away to pick up the iPad:
“I raced over and walked into a large high-tech office. I told the receptionist I was there to see the kind gentleman, and she said he was expecting me. I asked her if he told her why I was there, and she said no. I proceeded to tell her the story, and by the end we were all crying. He rounded the corner, and to my surprise he was a “kid” (to me at least because most of my kids are older than him). He had Shea’s iPad clutched in his hands and happily handed it to me. I gave him a big bear hug, and he returned with an equally firm squeeze. I’m not sure he understood why I was crying so I told him I hoped he realized this was not about getting her iPad back (although it was really great… really great), but it was about him and the lengths he must have gone to find me.”
So there you go. 2016 might be a total gut-job of a year, but at least it’s nice to know that there might still be decent human beings out there.
