The legendary kindness of the Kiwis, hitchhiking and free cell phones

So in the neighbourhood where we are living there are these signs around that say "Hitching Post - Wellington CBD". I had noticed a few of them while driving around and found them intriguing. I thought it was a cool idea to have defined hitch hiking spots into the city, especially since that is where almost everyone is commuting. These posts came up in conversation back and the house and Chris (the dad) told us that he in fact was the person responsible for their creation. When he was on the city council he had them put out there.

He said that we should try them out because he said that although he knew some people used them he had no data on their effectiveness. I love hitch hiking (my last experience was in the back of a milk truck in Slovakia) so I was totally down. Chris further thought that it would be neat to have the editor of the local town paper come out to do a short story on our experience with it to highlight their use. I being a well known media/attention whore was more then happy to oblige.

So this morning we went out to one of these and met Simon, the editor of paper met us. He interviewed us quickly then snapped some photos of us at the stop. He then took off and told us that he would call for a follow up interview on our experience. He asked us how long we thought it would take to get picked up, we guessed 8 minutes, he seemed to think that was rather optimistic.

After 5 minutes of waiting someone stopped, unfortunately he wasn't going to the CBD. After 14 minutes another person stopped, was going to the CBD and we hopped in. We started talking and he was a nice guy, early 30's I would guess. He told us he was a project manager in construction. At some point on the drive it came out that Ben still needed a cell phone. Our new friend immediately makes a phone call to someone, which includes the phrase, "do you still have those phones". He hung up and asked us if we wanted free cell phones. I already had one but I figured that someone else coming might need it or I might lose mine so I said yes. We exchanged contact info (and found out his name was Matthew Banks) as he dropped us off and said he would drop them off where we were staying.

All and all the trip itself was quite convenient, a total process of 25 minutes including waiting and no cost. The bus/train would have been 30-40 minutes and 6 dollars. Around 1pm, I get a call and low and behold it is Matty Banks asking us if we can meet him somewhere to get the phones. 5 minutes later (Wellington is quite small) we meet up he gives us 3 brand new Nokia cell phones (older models, but never opened). He asks absolutely nothing in return and tells us that if we ever need anything give him a call. We haven't had our follow up interview yet, but probably tomorrow, who knew it would make such a great story. The paper with the story will come out on Tuesday though, woot.

The summery of this story is thus:

-Hitch hiking rocks
-New Zealanders are really nice (they really are)
-Attention is awesome
-Matthew Banks is the raddest fucking dude alive.

Joey