You’re asking if it was “begging”? Wrong question. This isn’t binary.

Most people think in categories:

beggar / not beggar.

Civilized / uncivilized.

Normal / abnormal.

That’s fragile thinking. Life doesn’t operate in binaries — it operates in distributions, outliers, and fat tails.

What you encountered was likely opacity — a human event outside the model. Could be:

• a foreigner with no grasp of the local or global lingua franca

• a mentally off person in functional disguise

• someone probing the edge of social generosity (the “free” loophole test)

• or just noise in the system — a human black swan with a small footprint

Don't try to overfit a clean narrative on something messy.

Most of life is “I don’t know,” and pretending otherwise is intellectual fraud.

Bottom line: you behaved like a mensch — helped, stayed calm, didn’t escalate.

That’s antifragility. You don’t need to explain the randomness.

You just absorb it and move on.

Don’t moralize noise. Just observe it.