When Linda Vienneau ventured out to her garage in Upper Coverdale, N.B. last Saturday morning, she could not believe her eyes.
“I came out and immediately noticed that my generator was gone,” she said.
She says a thief had literally walked away up the road with her $1.500 power generator. It’s the same one she used to keep her warm during a five-day power outage last winter.
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“I was devastated. I did not think I would ever get it back,” she said.
Enter Chris Taylor: a forklift operator from Salisbury who lives up the way. That very morning at around 6 a.m., he was on his way to work when he suddenly spotted, a beast of a generator on the road, there for the taking.
With no one around, he says he pulled over, hopped out and swiped it up as fast as he could.
“I think adrenaline just took over and I picked it up and I could not get it all the way up so I had to rest it on the car and re-grip it and I got in the car and I was all out of breath,” he said.
After all, it’s not often you come across such a lucrative find.
At first, he says he did consider keeping it.
“Anyone in their right mind would say, ‘yeah I thought about that.’ But no,” he said.
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The old notion of finders keepers goes against everything his parents taught him.
“I guess that is where I get my honesty from,” he said.
So Chris took to social media and he spotted Linda’s post about her runaway generator and sent her a friend request.
“He said, ‘I have something that might belong to you,”‘ said Vienneau.
Thanks to the honesty of one of the good guys, that runaway generator found its way back home.
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Just who made off with it in the first place is still a mystery. But Vienneau says the whole experience has restored her faith in humanity.
“He could have kept that. Nobody would every have known. He did a good deed,” she said.
Taylor’s only regret hoisting that generator into the back of his SUV: that he didn’t have his folklift to help him.