There's this famous Tennessee Williams line, "I've always depended on the kindness of strangers."
Truthfully, I haven't done that. I really put value into being more or less self-sufficient, and I try really hard to solve my own problems.
Sometimes though, you just have to reach out to other folks, even complete strangers.
That happened to me at work yesterday. I spent the better part of 5 hours trying to do something that on the surface appeared to be simple, but kept running into roadblock after roadblock. I logged onto this sort of chat board for web developers, and one guy in particular, who I'd never talked to before, jumped in and offered to take a deep dive look into my issue.
We did every possible thing under the sun to try to find the answer. In the end, we still weren't successful. But I understood the nature of the problem way better than when I had started.
I was convinced I had eough knowledge to solve the problem myself now. I told my new friend as much, thanked him profusely and offered to buy him a beer at a conference if we both managed to get to it.
I'm grateful that a complete stranger could be such a decent person.