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.

My unsung hero is a boy named Spencer.

He was my son.

Julie would drop off soup at our house.

I look forward to it every week. I would say thank you for

giving me one of the best gifts of my life. Today's story comes from a woman who

asked to go by the name Lily in order to protect her identity.

A few years ago, Lily had to get a restraining order against a man whom she accused of stalking

her. The document was 60 pages long and she had to fax it to the police

department at her own expense. She went to her local UPS store and gave the document to a salesperson she recognized, a man named Jeff.

And he gave me the price for faxing 60 pages and as I recall it was a pretty hefty price tag for this task that I didn't even want to do.

And I hand him the papers and he kind of looked a little curiously at them

wondering what they were and I feel like a look of concern

crossed his face and he was like what is this?

And I just very briefly explained what I was dealing with and he

was like okay well how about you just go take a walk and do some errands and come back in a little while because it's going to take me

some time to get all these pages faxed and when you come back it'll all be handled.

And so I did and when I back, he wasn't there anymore.

There was a different salesperson standing at the desk.

And I noticed my stack of papers were sitting there by the cash register and there was a yellow posted on them and on the

post it was scrawled a little happy face and the words like it's all taken care of and I was confused I was like wait so how do I

...