No Good Deed Goes Unpunished
Next time you either collect it yourself or it goes to the tip
Of course I’ve always been familiar with the phrase No Good Deed Goes Unpunished but I’d never really thought about it until last week. Here’s what happened…
We had a redundant chest freezer. Perfect working order but something we were never going to use again. Cost about £250 new but there’s really no demand for second-hand white goods. “Dump it,” I suggested. “No,” said my wife Janie, “we’ll put it up for sale on the local online sales forum for £100.”
So we did and we got a taker but then…
“I’m only a poor healthcare worker,” (she was) “and I don’t have a car big enough to transport it,” (she didn’t) “so any possibility you could deliver it?”
We loaded the freezer into a trailer and drove off to deliver it — only to discover she lived in a house at the top of a very steep and narrow drive. Too steep to push or carry the freezer all the way up there. (It’s not tha they are heavy just too big and boxy to easily carry.) So I drove up the drive and unloaded the freezer. Job done. Now I just had to get out of there.
The drive was to narrow to turn around in with the car and trailer and I didn’t fancy reversing down the drive back onto the road, as it was one of those two-wheel trailers that have a mind of their own when you try to reverse them. I know, I thought, if I unhitch the trailer, I’ll be able to turn the car around, re-hitch the trailer and bingo, bongo, off we go.
Bad idea. Once unhitched the trailer acted like a creature possessed and started heading back down the drive at a furious rate of knots with me and Janie in hot pursuit. Then it hit a small wall, span round 180 degrees and continued on its way before running into a stout gatepost which stopped it dead — in fact it hit the gatepost with such force it embedded itself in the timber.
Sod the gatepost: rather more importantly as it did its spinning act, the runaway trailer side-swiped knocking her to the floor, winding her, giving her coccyx a hefty bang, and leaving her with a cut face and heavy bruising on her thighs. Touch wood nothing more serious — although a week later Janie is still walking with a limp — but it could have been so much worse: broken bones, a broken hip! The latter a complete nightmare as the current dire state of the National Health Service in the UK means you dare not be injured — you can expect a NINE hour wait before an ambulance arrives, no laughing matter if you are lying on the floor outside, PLUS a further three hours waiting at the hospital to be unloaded and moved into A&E. And once you are in hospital you risk catching Covid and, when you are immobilised with a broken hip, pneumonia.
If that were not bad enough, it could have been even worse. What if the trailer had run onto the road and collided with a car or, as passed us by a few minutes later, run into a group of cyclists out for a leisurely ride. I can see the headlines now: Foolish Pensioner (that’s me) Slaughters Peloton with Runaway Trailer.
It’s fair to say both of us have had nightmares not only replaying the accident as it happened (is it just me or when those things happen, does everything happen in slow motion) but also contemplating just how a truly awful life-changing disaster it could have been.
And all for doing a favour over a £100 second-hand chest freezer. Did I mentioned the trailer sustained damage. Most of it I could bash back into shape but a light unit was smashed. Cost of replacement £45. So all that for the princely sum of £55!
Truly no good deed goes unpunished.
Next time we have some unwanted household goods to sell or give away, the buyers collects it for themselves — that or we take it to the tip or burn it.
By way of a side project, I researched the background to the phrase No good deed goes unpunished. Most definitions say something along the lines of it being a sardonic commentary on the frequency with which acts of kindness backfire on those who offer them. Or to put it another way: those who help others are doomed to suffer as a result of their helpfulness.
It has been attributed to several people including Billy Wilder, Clare Boothe Luce, and Oscar Wilde. Dante wrote a similar adage in his narrative poem The Divine Comedy: “amor sementa in voi d’ogne virtute/e d’ogni operazion che merta pene” (“love is the seed in you of every virtue/and of all acts deserving punishment”). In one form or another, the saying dates back to at least the 14th century, if not to antiquity as there are echoes of it in the Biblical Book of Job.
Moral of the story: just say no.
