St. John Ambulance donation incident

Well, this incident happened to me only and as far as I know nobody else encounters it before. Hence, the opinion about St. John Ambulance is totally personal.

It was a lovely Sunday morning. I purposely woke up earlier that morning because I planned to go pasar pagi to buy breakfast and newspaper before MF wakes up. The pasar pagi is just less than 5 minutes drive from my house. And, it was not surprisingly crowded with aunties buying breakfast and food and morning joggers enjoying their breakfast at the restaurant.

While I still haven't decided getting what for breakfast, there's this young fellow, at his 15 i guess, holding a donation can labelled with St. John Ambulance logo, approaching me. He put up a smiley face and asked for my donation. With only a RM10 bill in my pocket, I did a quick calculation and decided that I could donate RM2 to him (for buying a small paper flag). I held the RM10 bill in my hand and asked if he could give me back RM8 change. "Cannot. But you can get 5 flags with RM10 donation lor." I insisted that if he could give me RM8 change then I will donate RM2. But he still kept on saying the same thing.

Maybe they give some sort of training on how to get the most out of a donor to these fellows they send out. Or maybe there's kind of hall of fame for the most donation that's why they wanted to get as much of donation as they can. Or this fellow just simply have no change for RM8. I got no choice. I do donate whenever it's possible especially to this kind of well-known association as I believe they will put the money in good use.

However this time, I passed. I didn't say anything more to him again and just said sorry and left. And he didn't go on asking again either. Probably he thought I was simply kedekut. But I didn't care much.

I went on buying MF's favourite chicken rice and my Chi Cheong Fan and a SinChew then went back home afterward.