I took the bus to school yesterday morning. While I was at the bus stop, there was a man there that started to talk with me. As it usually is with strangers, I’m hesitant to start a conversation, but I tend not to ignore someone who talks about how nice the weather is for the day.

Of course innocent conversation starters usually don’t end there. This man proceeded to tell me about the morning he had. He was making casserole in the oven, but when he took it out of the oven, the casserole wasn’t put in all the way so it fell onto the kitchen floor. “I got lucky that it didn’t touch my legs! It was really close,” he said, while he motioned his hands in the air to imply he was grabbing napkins and cleaning the mess from the oven. What a rough morning.

Our conversation doesn’t stop there. He began to talk about the police report he had to write. He pointed out the apartment complex that he lives at not too far away from the bus stop, and he told me that someone broke into his apartment and took everything. And to clarify what he meant by “broke into,” the robber didn’t break his door down—his door was completely fine. Whoever broke into his place used a master key and took photos of all his bank account information, passport, and whatever else was in his apartment. He said people who used to work at the complex were bad enough to take the master key with them after they quit their job.

The reason why he has to write this police report himself is because the police won’t write it themselves, and he has to pester them to give his case a police number (making it official in the police records). Apparently whoever owns the apartment complex he’s living in has some connection with the police, so the police won’t file any reports from that place because that would scare away buyers. If this sounds crazy to you, you’re not alone. I was thinking the same thing as this man told me this.

The conversation then proceeds to the topic of crime. He tells me that someone in America gets robbed every 8 seconds, and that a million Americans have to deal with identity theft. He needs to work on the police report without the help of the cops so that he doesn’t have to go through any issues about people doing things under his name. “If I can make this official, then it’ll my proof if somebody ever tries to do something funny, y’know?”

Before we got on the bus, he ended our chat by smiling, saying that it was still a beautiful day that morning. The weather was pretty nice.

At the end of the day, this guy can still smile and look on the bright side. How someone could be happy after all that is astonishing. The man’s probably gone through tougher times in his life.