Chick-fil-A employee praised after helping feed disabled customer: 'May God bless this woman'
A Chick-fil-A employee at the La Palmera Mall in Texas was seen going above and beyond her job description on Saturday when a fellow diner at the food court snapped a photo of her helping a disabled man eat his meal.
Ashley Gusman was halfway through her workday, according to Corpus Christi, Texas, news station KIII-TV, when Arturo Ramirez showed up for his usual mid-day meal. The disabled customer is a regular at the Chick-fil-A location, and the woman who posted the photo wrote that he usually dines alone. This time, he was joined by a friendly face.
Gusman told KIII-TV about her decision to provide Ramirez assistance that day.
“Usually, we help him around and get his food,” she told the outlet, “but that day I helped him. I got him his food and I went around and I sat with him.”
To her surprise, fellow diners were watching and taking note of her good deed. One even took a photo of the pair and shared it to Facebook.
“I’ve seen this man several times here by himself,” Jessica Gomez wrote in a now-viral Facebook post. “The times I’ve been here everyone just leaves him. She cut his food into pieces and went back several times to get him whatever he needed. May God bless this woman.”
Just a few days after Gomez posted the photo, it garnered over 1,000 reactions and more than 600 shares, with comments from people all over expressing their appreciation for 19-year-old Gusman’s generosity. Some locals even said that they know Ramirez and have helped him with other daily tasks, such as grocery shopping.
Gusman assured KIII-TV that she wasn’t assisting Ramirez for the attention. Instead, she even questioned why she was singled out for helping the man when so many others have helped him as well.
“I really was surprised when I saw [the Facebook post] and I didn’t know what to think at first, and I was really nervous because all these people were seeing it,” she said. “And you know, out of everybody, why was it me?”
Gomez tells Yahoo Lifestyle that it was the rarity of seeing a random act of kindness that made the instance stand out to her. Especially since she’s seen Ramirez eating alone in that same food court before.
“I thought it was an amazing act of kindness,” she explains. “I’ve never seen anyone help this gentleman out before.”
Gusman doesn’t want to stop with this one good deed. She hopes to finish school someday and become a caregiver to seniors and people in hospice.
“It makes me feel good that I can have a connection with somebody and make their day a little bit better, or give them some positivity,” she said, “because you don’t know what people are going through.”
Gusman didn’t immediately respond to Yahoo Lifestyle’s request for comment.
Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:
• ‘We just enjoy his company’: Chick-fil-A employees honor favorite customer, a WWII vet, with free food for life
• Man pretending to be homeless rewards people who stopped to help him with $100
• Bus driver put aside money from paychecks to get Christmas presents for 70 students
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