766: Well Someone Had to Do SOMETHING!

Sean Cole

From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Sean Cole sitting in for Ira Glass. This is not a story about bicycle theft. It's a story about a counterintuitive impulse exhibited by the human species in which a lot of bicycles happen to get stolen.

The first bike belonged to a physical therapist named Carrie Helminger. This was in Seattle back in 2015. She rode her bike to work like always, locked it up securely like always. And when she came down to get it at the end of the day, it was gone. She felt about this how you might imagine.

Sean Cole

The cops were remarkably responsive, came right away. They were also deeply pessimistic. Said all the usual things-- you're not likely to get it back. We get reports like this all the time. There's really nothing we can do, unless something happens. Carrie wasn't sure what that meant, until something did happen. She was at work the next day, tending to her physical therapy patients, only checking her phone now and then between appointments.

Sean Cole

Which Carrie says that would have been fine with her. It's better than having no bike. Anyway, she didn't know how to respond. Put the phone down, examined more hips and shoulders and knees, came back to another text.

Sean Cole

This is the guy who was texting. Dirk deGroot, works in marine construction, big cyclist himself. By questionable, he means the ad was poorly written and listed the bike for way less than it should have cost.

Sean Cole

It's a site where people can register their bikes and report them stolen, as Carrie had done.

Sean Cole

Dirk did do it, arranged to meet the guy selling the bike. Except when he got to the appointed spot, unexpectedly, it was three guys, two more than him. He gives the bike a once over, careful to check out the serial number, which he'd gotten from Carrie. And sure enough, it's hers.

Sean Cole

So he takes out his phone, kind of subtly dials 911, and the call won't go through. No signal.

Sean Cole

And as if there were ever any doubt as to the provenance of the bike, one of the guys, at the very mention of the police, just takes off running.

Sean Cole

And then, after several long moments with the three of them just kind of staring at each other, as though bidding farewell to a couple of drinking buddies for the evening, Dirk says--

Sean Cole

Which brings me to what the story is about-- the fact that Dirk's actions, while seeming to come totally natural to him, made no sense from the outside, even to the person who directly benefited from those actions. Carrie's brain could not stop trying to make sense of it, even as she rode away that night.

Sean Cole

But there wasn't. Dirk just does stuff like this-- like if he's driving, and he sees a cyclist with a flat tire.

Sean Cole

He likes helping people. He can still picture how happy Carrie looked when he dropped the bike off.

Sean Cole

And he did keep doing it. Before too long, he recovered a bike for a guy from Colorado, who had just moved to town. Like Carrie, the guy was very grateful to have his bike back. Then there was the college student who bought Dirk a six-pack of IPA after he rescued her bike for her. Dirk doesn't really drink beer, though. The systems administrator who mailed him an envelope of cash, which wasn't even the nicest part of it for Dirk.

Sean Cole

His methods were pretty consistent-- always started with obsessively scrolling sites like Craigslist and OfferUp to see what bikes were for sale, and then cross-referencing those against the stolen bikes on Bike Index. Then he'd message the person selling the stolen bike and say he's interested in buying it. Sometimes, he'd give the cops a heads up and have them waiting nearby to swoop in at just the right moment. Other times, he just confidently and with an almost eerie calm say something like--

Sean Cole

It took him 10 recoveries before he really felt like he knew what he was doing. After the 20th one, a Seattle police detective who specialized in property crime gave Dirk his direct line, told him to always call and arrange for backup ahead of time.

That sting, the 20th one, was significant in a lot of ways, actually. It wasn't just a bike theft, it was a home invasion. The thieves grabbed everything they could get their hands on. Dirk essentially cracked that case. One of the officers on duty that night looked at Dirk and asked him the perennial question.

Sean Cole

The Seattle Times broke the story, followed by local TV and radio outlets, other newspapers and magazines. In all of the accounts, Dirk stayed anonymous. He only decided to unmask himself for this story, because he's not doing it anymore. He says he just hasn't had time for anything since his kids came along. But the newsworthiness of it was that someone would go so very far out of his way to retrieve property that wasn't his for people he didn't know. It was like the whole world had the same reaction as Carrie Helminger, the first person Dirk helped, who was mentioned in one of the magazine pieces.

Sean Cole

Of course, the whole thing seems a lot less weird if you're Dirk deGroot. From his perspective, he figured out how to solve this problem. And once he figured it out, he couldn't not solve it, because no one else was doing it. He was like, somebody's got to do it.

Sean Cole

I actually can't think of a better way to spend your time on this planet than to identify something that's vexing someone else, or a lot of someone else's, and to put yourself into that gap between them and the solution. So today on our show, we're going to tell you about some remarkable people who do that, and why they do it, and how it goes, or doesn't go, for them. Stay with us.

Sean Cole

There's this image that's really stuck with a lot of us here at the show. You might have seen it. It's a photo of strollers, baby strollers, at a train station in Poland. In short, these Polish moms, anticipating a problem that Ukrainian refugee mothers might have when they cross the border clutching their little kids, started leaving strollers for them at different points of entry. In the photo, they're all lined up on the train platform-- some fancy, some not, some new, some with worn tires. Each one, a Polish family thinking about what could possibly be helpful when everything else is falling apart and providing it.

Another problem that war has yielded, you've probably heard, is the lack of access in Russia to real accurate information about what's going on, the brutality of the war. Essentially, the Russian propaganda bubble tamping down on public opposition, which is what Act One of today's show is about. And it's about someone on a personal mission to solve that problem. We're calling this act, "Cold Call to Action." It's from producer Alix Spiegel.

Alix Spiegel

Paulius Senuta spent the first 13 years of his life in the USSR, so he knows how complicated it can be to live in a world with limited information. This was Lithuania in the '80s. And what Paulius remembers about living in that world is the distrust and the haziness. You had your suspicions, a creeping sense that there was something off about the news you were hearing, but there was no way to know for sure. And no one around you knew either.

So after Putin invaded Ukraine, Paulius reached out to friends in Russia to talk about the war. These were educated people, well-read people. But the Russian version of what was happening made his blood run cold. The story they'd heard was that Russia was just trying to help with the genocide.

Alix Spiegel

In the world Russians knew, there were no pregnant mothers dying on gurneys, no leveled cities, no dead civilians at all.

Alix Spiegel

It was a whole parallel universe of information, constructed and policed by Putin. Paulius believes the foundations of that universe are more fragile than they look, that if the Russian people could really see, know what was happening in their name, Putin's Potemkin village might crumble. Someone needed to do something, so Russians could understand the real horror of the war they were fighting.

And then one day, Paulius was sitting in a meeting, and his phone began to buzz. It was a friend calling to say that he had an idea about how they might solve this "Russians don't know about the war" problem.

Alix Spiegel

As they talked, the two began to piece together a plan. What if they built a website where you pushed a button and got the name and telephone number of someone somewhere in Russia? Russian speakers from outside Putin's sealed universe could call in, tell Russian people, one by one, person to person, all about what was going on.

Paulius works in advertising. He spent his life trying to convince people to do something they do not currently feel a need to do. So he knew that hearing an authentic human voice making a passionate case can be a very powerful way to alter someone's behavior.

Alix Spiegel

Still, Paulius wasn't sure that this was a good idea. So many Russian speakers outside the country were really angry. He worried he'd just be creating a tool for people to shout at each other. Paulius himself was struggling with his feelings about the Russian people.

Alix Spiegel

Paulius didn't have a clear answer. What he knew was that the scheme had at least the potential to help shift the tide, so he put his doubts aside and decided to go forward.

Alix Spiegel

Paulius says that he and his colleagues worked around the clock for five days until the website, Call Russia, went live about a week and a half into the war. The landing page featured a large yellow button, which randomly generated Russian telephone numbers.

And the site was an immediate hit. Paulius says they logged 32,000 calls in the first two days. Still, it wasn't until late on launch day that Paulius himself was able to sit down and try out this idea. He pressed the yellow button, then called the number that appeared on his screen. The phone was answered by a man.

Alix Spiegel

A few calls later, Paulius heard the voice of a woman.

Alix Spiegel

Paulius says that many of the calls have been like those-- unreceptive, hostile. But then, every once in a while, there's a different kind of call, like the man who answered the phone and, at first, seemed quite friendly.

Alix Spiegel

So Paulius went forward, told the man about the war. All the terrors that Paulius had seen on TV poured out of him.

Alix Spiegel

The day we spoke, I watched Paulius make a bunch of calls to strangers in different parts of Russia. What struck me was the tedium. It felt like very bizarre geopolitical telemarketing.

Alix Spiegel

There were a lot of dead-ends.

Alix Spiegel

But every once in a while, Paulius got through.

Alix Spiegel

Paulius makes calls like these several times a week. He spends hours on the phone. Sometimes, he gets people like the quiet man, listeners who connect. But mostly, Paulius says, people are screaming. And oddly, he thinks that those calls are the best.

Alix Spiegel

Paulius is realistic about what this approach will accomplish. He says about 75% of the Russian population supports Putin, and those people aren't going to suddenly take to the streets. But he figures he might nudge them a little so that, when they see their neighbors protesting, instead of reaching out to the police to let them know, they might pause, ask themselves if that's really the best thing to do. That's why even when someone is yelling, Paulius tries to persevere.

Paulius told me he'd never know for sure whether anything he was doing made even a whit of difference. But even if these calls were a drop of water for a forest fire, Paulius still thought it was important to try.

Alix Spiegel

Paulius says, since the website launched, they've been tracking the countries where people were calling from. He told me that, at first, calls were mostly from where he was-- Lithuania. But soon, he and his colleagues noticed it was spreading, the idea hopping from one country to the next, until they saw that Russian speakers from all over the world were reaching out to the people inside Putin's bubble. They'd seen the same problem Paulius did, and they were all trying their best to solve it with him.

Sean Cole

Alix Spiegel is one of the producers of our show.

Sean Cole

Act Two, "Zoo Unto Others." On the first day of the war, there were 30 visitors to the zoo in Kyiv, Ukraine. On the ninth day of the war, there were none, no paying visitors. That was the day Washington Post reporter, Siobhan O'Grady, and a couple of her colleagues went there to meet the zookeepers.

Siobhan had been wondering about the people in Ukraine who are still working while the country had been under siege. Not just military, but everyday workers-- pharmacists, grocery store employees. It's the same thought a lot of us have had about essential workers during the pandemic, except, in this case, there were literally bombs going off around them. She wanted to know what it was like to do their jobs now under what are probably the most extreme circumstances possible.

They went to the zoo in the afternoon for a few rushed hours before curfew. Siobhan said it was eerie-- the giant colorful giraffe statue at the entrance, after they had just passed through several checkpoints to get there. The winding paths were virtually empty.

The zookeepers were keeping the animals inside, partly because of the cold, and also because the animals could be killed if they came out for some exercise at the wrong moment. The zoo is right near a military facility that might be targeted by Russian forces, and they were worried about errant missiles. In total, about 50 staffers out of the usual 375 had stayed behind to look after the animals. I ask Siobhan what was behind their decision to stick it out.

Sean Cole

4,000 animals going to be locked away in their pens and enclosures, slowly starving to death, if dehydration didn't get them first. And not just anyone can do this job. It takes special skill and knowledge of the different animals' dietary needs. Some of the animals need to live at different temperatures than others. It's a hefty enough task during peacetime. And of course, lots of aspects of the job are different in a war zone.

Sean Cole

Some of the staffers and their families occasionally sleep in an aquarium that's still under construction-- underground, bunker-like. Siobhan told me you could see where, one day, hopefully, there'll be glass and fish. But right now, there are all kinds of cots with pillows and sleeping bags on them. Siobhan imagined how nice and cool it would be to hang out down there during the summer months, if and when they can finish building it.

Sean Cole

During their tour of the zoo, the zookeepers handed Siobhan an apple and showed her how to feed Horace, the elephant with sleep trouble.

Sean Cole

In the administration building, one of the animal handlers was feeding a brand new baby lemur, this incredibly small, soft, delicate thing, especially compared to the chaos it was born into. They named him Bayraktar, which is a kind of Turkish drone that the Ukrainians are deploying against the Russians. They're thinking of naming his sibling, Javelin.

Siobhan asked the zookeepers which of the animals were the least concerned about all of the explosions and sirens. The crocodiles, they said, and the alligator. All they care about is eating.

But as interesting as she found the animals, it was really the people she was there to learn about. One of the zookeepers who interested her most was Ivan Rybchenko, who still commutes to the zoo from home on his bike.

Sean Cole

Which is something Siobhan has seen a lot of, she says. The people who've chosen to stay and continue doing their jobs amid the fighting, all of them see what they're doing as their role in the defending of Ukraine. After all, along with staving off the day-to-day attacks, they also need to preserve any pockets of normalcy they can, the things they had before the invasion. And that will mean still having a zoo when the war ends one day.

You can reach Siobhan's article for the Washington Post about the Kyiv zoo at washingtonpost.com.

Coming up, being a voice for the voiceless in possibly the most macabre and yet literal meaning of that phrase. That's in a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues.

Sean Cole

It's This American Life. I'm Sean Cole, in for Ira Glass. Today's program-- Well, Someone Had To Do Something-- stories about someone's stepping up, taking it upon themselves to tackle some problem, large or small, for the greater good, or just for a discrete few, because who else is going to? We've reached Act Three of our show. Act Three, "One Last Thing After I Go."

All the people tackling problems in the show up to this point identified themselves what needed to be done. In this next story, the person jumping into the fray never even conceived of the thing that he was ultimately asked to do by somebody else. Producer Aviva DeKornfeld explains.

Aviva DeKornfeld

This all started a few years back as a joke in strange circumstances, yes, but definitely, it was not meant to be taken seriously.

Aviva DeKornfeld

This is Bill Edgar, a private investigator in Queensland, Australia. And around the time of the joke, Bill had been looking into some financial matters for a client named Graham.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Graham told Bill he had something he wanted said at his funeral, stuff he wanted to be sure everyone would hear. He thought about making a video of himself giving his own eulogy, but worried his family wouldn't play it. This thing he had to say, it wasn't very funeral appropriate. So as a joke, Bill offered to crash his funeral and say whatever it was Graham wanted said.

Aviva DeKornfeld

A couple of weeks later, Bill got a text from Graham basically saying, let's do it. Once I'm dead, you go to my funeral, and I'll prepare a thing for you to say.

Aviva DeKornfeld

Bill agreed to do it, and Graham explained the situation. After he'd gotten sick and become bedridden, his best friend, John, had started hitting on his wife, trying to sleep with her. Graham had even seen it happen a few times. His wife told John to knock it off, but he wouldn't stop. And Graham was too sick to really engage or do anything about it, but it made him really mad.

So this is what Graham wanted Bill to do-- go to his funeral, and when his best friend stood up to deliver his eulogy, Bill was to interrupt him and call him out for what he'd done. Graham eventually died, and Bill, a total stranger to the family, went to his funeral, armed with Graham's message written on a piece of paper. Bill was nervous. The service started.

Aviva DeKornfeld

The best friend, John, speed walked out of the church. Bill heard some people whispering, telling him to sit down. But Bill had a job to do. There was more to read.

Aviva DeKornfeld

The brother, along with his wife and their daughter, quickly left the church, as well.

Aviva DeKornfeld

As quickly as it started, it ended. Bill folded up the paper, put it on top of the coffin, and walked outside to his car. His shirt was soaked through with nervous sweat. He was worried angry relatives might come after him. But at the same time, he was pretty clear on how he felt about the whole thing.

Aviva DeKornfeld

And not too much later, that friend reached out to Bill.

Aviva DeKornfeld

The aunty, Christine, she was dying of leukemia. And she was secretly in love with her best friend, Carol. Bill did her funeral, and then another, and another.

Enough people started reaching out to Bill that he figured he should really pick a name for himself, make this all a bit more official. So he decided on the Coffin Confessor. Bill's done a bunch of confessions at this point. People pay him to do it, and he likes the work. It suits him.

Bill is a man who is constitutionally opposed to artifice. As a private investigator, he sees how messy people's lives really are, so he hates all the pomp and rituals candy coating most funerals. It feels phony. He thinks it's better when people tell the truth, whatever that truth may be.

People say funerals are for the living. Bill thinks that's all wrong. Why shouldn't the dead get a say in how they leave this world? It's their funeral.

People hire Bill to confess all kinds of things. Sometimes, it's nice stuff. They just want to tell their family they love them one last time. One time, a client asked Bill to interrupt his funeral to apologize to his ex-wife and tell her how much she meant to him. That one went well. Other times, it's something petty. Someone wants to literally get the last word.

One guy, an atheist, hired Bill to interrupt his funeral, which he knew his parents would turn into a religious affair against his wishes, to say, this is not what I wanted. That one did not go over so well.

And occasionally, he's asked to reveal something darker, like with this one recent client, who hired Bill to confess that he'd been having an affair with a neighbor for the past two years, the effect of which would be, this guy's wife would learn at his funeral, in front of everyone, that he'd been cheating on her. In cases like that, Bill encourages the person to maybe say that themselves before they die.

Aviva DeKornfeld

In all the funerals Bill's crashed, there's one that sticks with him. This biker guy reached out to Bill, said he had cancer and that he was interested in hiring him. So Bill drove to the biker's home to meet him. He was this huge, muscley guy covered with tattoos.

Aviva DeKornfeld

A few months later, the biker dies. As planned, Bill heads to the funeral and waits for his moment to jump in. He stands up midway through the ceremony and reads a letter he was given.

Aviva DeKornfeld

It's so easy to not say the thing you want to say, to go for years, even a lifetime, not finding the right words or the right moment. Sometimes the right moment is the last one, one final thing to shout over your shoulder into the party, as you're walking out the door.

Sean Cole

Aviva DeKornfeld is one of the producers of our show.

Sean Cole

Act Four, "A Funny Thing Happened When We Were Already AT the Theater." This last story is a counterexample of sorts where you'd be forgiven for thinking, did somebody have to do something? Or anyway, that's what a lot of people thought in this case. Chana Joffe-Walt has the story.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Here's what happened. A group of people went to a movie theater near Los Angeles to see The Lost City. It was a 7:00 PM showing, but the projector was broken, so everyone in the audience was stuck waiting-- 10 minutes, 20. And then a woman from the audience walked down to the front of the theater in front of everyone and started doing standup.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Any single moms in the house, she says. There's short clips of this online. She's in a beige dress, long, straight hair, waving her arms all over the place, trying to project her voice to the back of the theater. The act is chaotic and hard to follow. She's pretty all over the place.

Chana Joffe-Walt

She does voices.

Chana Joffe-Walt

She chants.

Chana Joffe-Walt

And she sings.

Chana Joffe-Walt

These are people who showed up to see Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum roam around in the jungle. Instead, they got this.

Chana Joffe-Walt

There are tweets from audience members who are not happy about that switch. One of them says, a woman has decided to try her standup out on us. It's not good. Another one says, I want to crawl out of my skin and die. In one of the videos posted online, you can hear someone in the audience actually interrupt her act to yell, put us out of our misery!

Chana Joffe-Walt

The woman's response-- this is what got me-- she says--

Chana Joffe-Walt

Do you want to come down here and try to entertain people, as if entertaining everyone in this theater was a job someone obviously had to do.

Chana Joffe-Walt

The woman's name is Tiffany King. She's 42 years old, Latina, lives in Los Angeles. She has one eight-year-old daughter. She does many things-- waitresses, sings. She does college online and sometimes does standup.

And the way Tiffany King ended up performing unsolicited comedy that night-- there's the story on the internet, and then there's her story, which is different. Tiffany says she took her daughter to the movies that night.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Everyone was just sitting around, Tiffany says, waiting. So she turns to her daughter and says, wouldn't it be funny if I go introduce the movie, like I'm with the theater? Do it, her daughter says.

So Tiffany gets up in front of everyone. Hello, welcome to the theater. We're so glad to have you. The show will be starting shortly. And then she says, just kidding. I'm a comedian. But I do hope you all have good night, and she sits down. But then they're still waiting, and waiting, and nobody's doing anything.

So Tiffany gets up again, decides, I'm going to go find out what's going on. She goes down to the lobby. A guy tells her the projector's broken. They're working on it. She told them, we're sweating like crazy in there. The guy says they'd work on the AC. Then, Tiffany says, she went back to the theater and walked up front just to tell everyone what was going on. She said the projector's broken. They're working on it. They know we're hot in here. They'll try to get the AC back.

Chana Joffe-Walt

So she went with a truly random collection of jokes. And from Tiffany's perspective, it was going fine. People were laughing, clapping.

Chana Joffe-Walt

It was only the next day that Tiffany learned some of her audience had not appreciated being subjected to an unwanted comedy show. But for me, knowing that Tiffany started as a person who was trying to deliver information about the movie, doesn't that change things? She was the one person trying to get answers to a problem that a whole room full of people shared. She was trying to pass on information, and it turned into this.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Because this is who Tiffany is.

Chana Joffe-Walt

Here's what I was thinking when Tiffany recounted this experience to me. I was thinking about when I was at the airport, and I was instructed to stand in a line for a desk that had no person at it. I stood there anyway. A long line of other people stood there anyway, too, quietly, except for one woman, who could not bear it, who was actively, loudly shouting to everyone and no one walking by that we needed help.

I kept looking down like, I'm not with her. But I was also glad for her, because ultimately, she got someone to help us, to tell us that we actually needed to go to a different desk, where there was a person where the printer was working. And the yelling woman, she led the way. We all followed her.

My point is, the person who takes it upon themselves to do something, they don't always do it in the way you would. They're not perfect, but neither are we, waiting in line for the desk with no person, or for the movie that's not starting.

Chana Joffe-Walt

I asked, did she consider that this was a situation where maybe no one needed help? Nobody needed to do anything. Tiffany said, no, the thought never crossed her mind, which I think is probably an important part of being a person who rushes to be helpful, a person who acts. You can't ask yourself that question.

Sean Cole

Chana Joffe-Walt is one of the producers of our show.

[MUSIC - "IF YOU GOT A PROBLEM" BY JOY OLADOKUN]

Sean Cole

Today's program was produced by Lilly Sullivan and edited by Ben Calhoun. The people who put our show together include Bim Adewunmi, Elna Baker, Zoe Chase, Dana Chivvis, Michael Comite, Andrea Lopez Cruzado, Aviva DeKornfeld, Chana Joffe-Walt, Tobin Low, Michele Navarro, Stowe Nelson, Katherine Rae Mondo, Will Peischel, Alix Spiegel, Laura Starcheski, Christopher Swetala, Matt Tierney, Julie Whitaker, and Diane Wu. Managing editor is Sarah Abdurrahman. Senior editor, David Kestenbaum. Our executive editor is Emanuele Berry.

Special thanks today to Whitney Shefte, Kostyantin Khudov, Lesia Prokopenko, Christopher Solomon, Bryan Hance, Kate Swoger, Ali deGroot, Maggie Stapleton, Eric Dean Wilson, Sam Schiller, Joe Kremer, Melissa San Miguel, and Stacey King.

Our website, thisamericanlife.org. This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange. Thanks, of course, to my boss, Ira Glass.

When I started working here, I was nervous. And I said to him. I was like, what do you prefer? Should I call you Mr. Glass? Should I call you Ira, you know? And he's like, no, no, no, no. You can call me--

Sean Cole

I'm Sean Cole. Ira will be back next week with more stories of This American Life.

[MUSIC - "IF YOU GOT A PROBLEM" BY JOY OLADOKUN]