From Hidden Brain Media, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

This is my unsung hero.

Stories where one person reached out to help another in a time of need.

I would like to thank my unsung hero.

I do not know her name.

And all of a sudden I look up, and this hand slides two warm chocolate chip cookies across the desk.

To this day, it was one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me.

Today's story comes from Jamie Spurway of Glasgow, Scotland.

In 1998, Jamie took an organized bus tour across the United States

from the East Coast to California. At the end of the tour, he planned to head south from

San Francisco to Newport Beach, where he'd be studying for a semester. He was 19 years old,

and it was his first time traveling overseas by himself.

So suddenly I was going to be on my own. I was going to have to be responsible for my decisions

and my, all the travel plans and everything. Luckily for Jamie, he met a nice Irish couple on the

trip. They were making their way to Venice Beach, which wasn't far from Jamie's final destination.

So the three of us traveled together, took a Greyhound from San Francisco to L.A.

And we went up to the...

There was an information desk in the Greyhound building.

There was a woman sat at the information desk, and so we went up confidently and said,

Can you help us get to Venice Beach? And she pretty much just shrugged, just said, like,

no, I don't know how you do that. She, there was absolutely useless in terms of information provision.

So we went outside into the sunlight, into the heat. It was a pretty hot day. And we started to try to take local buses from the centre of LA out to Venice Beach. But it quickly proved significantly more difficult than we thought it was going to be. I think we maybe took three or four, maybe even five different bus journeys, possibly going in

...