This is going to take a bit of explaining. My wife has had a wooden yardstick for many, many years that has become something of a personal heirloom, as well as being somewhat unusual: the cross section of the yardstick is square and it has both metric and English markings on opposite sides, as well as some corporate information on the other sides as it was obviously a marketing giveaway long, long ago. She has used it for sewing, but I borrowed it for a little project I was doing and ....
Well, I stepped on it and broke it.
Debby was pretty nice -- there tends to be a fair amount of breakage when I'm around and she's sort of gotten used to it -- but I felt awful. There was no way that I could buy a replacement, given the odd design and age. So just as a wild stab in the dark, I Googled the company and found out that they are still around happily providing services to the oil industry. I emailed them describing the situation and asking if they still happened to have any of these things around and if so could they possibly help get me out of the doghouse? To my considerable surprise I got a very nice answer from the president of the company and, a few days later, a package in the mail with a brand new yardstick ... and also a hat.
Wow! What a really nice thing to do. I really appreciate it.