Shortly after moving to the US, I lost my passport after visiting the social security office. I didn't even notice it was missing until a good samaritan sent me an @mention on Twitter claiming he'd found it on the sidewalk. He interrupted his day to hand it to me personally.

Good samaritans are everywhere. Most don't write blog posts about their good deeds.

The good samaritan in this case didn't write a blog post. Exec did. They're using this as a bit of publicity, and honestly, I don't see anything wrong with that.

In general I agree, but this feels slightly staged. Why would you take a photo of the handoff?

Because you've already decided that this would make a great blog post, and so you want to make sure to get some pictures. A comment below by justin (who apparently works for Exec) seems to indicate this is the case.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3951355

I'm happy that the guy got his documents returned to him, and I don't question the story's truth. But how is this blog post anything but a PR thing for Exec?

By definition anything on their blog is PR for Exec. But it's also a fun, heartwarming story so I don't see the problem.

If it wasn't a fun, heartwarming story, would there be a problem? PR is PR, it is what it is. There's good PR and there's bad PR, naturally.

It's an ill wind...

Right, I'm just wondering why this is relevant to Hacker News.

Well they aren't going to post a story about "Man uses Exec to kill neighbours cat." are they.

As well as this story turned out, surely it's a bad idea (assuming you're not an evil criminal) to just hand someone else's immigration documents to a stranger to return? Sure, Exec vets its people, but it can't be perfect. What's wrong with either 1) doing it yourself after the meeting, or 2) turning it over to the police? Yes, the return will be delayed, but there's a significantly lower risk of personal info being compromised.

As someone who has lost immigration documents before, I heartily approve of whichever method you choose to get them back to me, regardless of whether that is a) handing it over to a secretary, b) handing it over to the cops, or c) handing it over to the first foreigner you meet on the assumption that all foreigners probably know each other.

That last one lead to a truly surreal telephone conversation with someone who, well, speaks Chinese a lot better than I do, but we did eventually get it sorted out.

I don't know about Japan, but I suspect that in most major metropolitan areas in the US b) has roughly the same chance of success as dropping them out of an airplane.

I'd go to a smaller police station personally, but then I live in the suburbs, where we have police officers who do have the time to do the legwork and return it. I do agree, though, the police's reliability can get spotty at times.

He's an existing customer of exec. If you'd trust them with your stuff (e.g. having them organize your storage unit), you could probably trust them with a random person's documents.

I believe the execs are actually employees of Exec, not random people (like task rabbit). There's a log of who was assigned to what task, etc., and it's a company (backed by YC) which would have a lot to lose if one of their agents did something bad.

I would probably not trust an exec with root on my servers (seems out of scope of what they offer), or huge piles of unaccounted-for-cash or loaded firearms, but I'd certainly trust them more than I'd trust a random person, and probably more than any cleaning/etc. person I could personally hire otherwise.

What's better:

A) Picking up and giving to EXEC when you don't have time to deal with it B) Leaving on the ground and letting possibly worse hands get a hold of it

Although handling it himself could have been better (assuming he is more trustworthy then EXEC), It was a responsible choice.

Well, my point was C) Pick it up and return it at some later point. Yes, A is much, much better than B, and the more responsible choice, but better != good.

Don't trust police.

Whilst I believe that this as you present it, I think you guys need to work on your marketing somewhat. Basically, the narrative of a spontaneous act of goodwill that just happens to be enabled by your service is at odds with the significant knowledge of the story and the posed photos.

It kinda looks like that is standard procedure for them: https://iamexec.com/feed

The possibly fairly detailed job descriptions apparently go through the company and are then assigned to the person doing the job, so it seems fairly plausible that someon at dispatch went "oh, that could be a good PR opportunity" and asked for more details.

Obviously the Exec guys decided to write about this before they handed the documents off. They could have asked Andrew for his picture after the fact.

Anyone else think he meant exec (3)?

I came here looking for an OS injection vulnerability in the new RFID-enabled passports.

well, the name of the company is a play on the exec (3) command, so in a way, yes :) it's also short for "executive assistant", so we have lots of double meaning going on.

What is the marketplace called that Exec. operates in? Some hybrid of on demand service, personal assistant.

Of course, not sure if such a service operates in PDX...

This reeks of PR fabrication.

Sorry, but Andrew really is that good of a guy. The Exec who picked it up happened to be in our office when he did, so we asked him to snap some pictures (with the parties' permission) in case it turned out to be a story with a happy ending. Which it did.

I can safely assure you it is not fabricated. I was here in the office this morning when the call came in. We were all pretty surprised about the nature of the request.