25-year-old Kyle Bigler has been walking 16 miles a day to his two minimum-wage jobs, where he often works 20-hour shifts. Kyle has a learning disability and a severe speech impediment that makes it hard for him to find work.
He tried to find a job closer to home since he doesn’t own a car, but only a Dunkin Donuts roughly 9 miles away was kind of enough to hire him. He found a second job at a Big Apple for his graveyard shift.
Kyle did this for a year before someone noticed. Joanna Griffiths pieced together Kyle’s efforts after encountering him three times in one day. She shared his story on Facebook:
“I felt the need to share this with all of you, and perhaps make this man go viral. Last week I got an iced coffee at Dunkin donuts around 7:30am, later on that day I saw the same man walking but was unable to pick him up or I would have been late for work myself. Little did I know, he was walking 8 1/2 miles to his second full time job at the Big Apple for his Graveyard shift. I stopped at the Big Apple on my way home from work around 10:45pm to see if he could use a lift home while I grabbed gas, but he politely declined stating he worked another 3+ hours closing.
The moral of the story is this, if you are an able bodied person, there is a job out there for you. No matter what the job may be. This man walks 16 miles every day between both his jobs, making minimum wage at both. Minimum wage in New Hampshire is $7.25/hr. This man shows that if you are motivated, ambitious, and WILLING to work, it IS possible.
Note: if he didn’t work and collected state and federal aid, he would make MORE than both his jobs combined.”
Griffiths woke up the next morning to thousands of messages from strangers offering him jobs and asking where they could donate money to help Bigler get a car. But one message stood out: It was from the owners of Autoserv Tilton, a local car dealership, who wanted to donate Kyle a car.
Courtesy of Sarah Daigle
Kyle is now the proud owner of a 2005 Honda Accord.
“I’m going to have to figure out what to do with my time now that I won’t be walking to work!”
