Well you took matters into your own hands and succeeded.
Today if their car overheats they probably call FEMA and wait for a check.
Remember the old trick of using a woman’s panty hose to get by if a fan belt broke? REmember keeping spare “flex” hoses in your trunk to replace a radiator hose if it burst? Hell, remember when radiator hoses used to burst? I can’t remember the last time I even heard of a radiator hose bursting much less having it happen to me.
That old car of mine boiled over so often I became an expert at removing the radiator cap while hot without getting burnt. I used to do that as a “parlor trick” just for kicks. I don’t think anyone else anywhere in the world was ever able to do that. It was something to see. I could pull that cap off bare handed and get back from the resulting scalding geyser without so much as a drop touching me. My technique was to not grab the cap. I let it fly on its own and then retrieved it later. It was a lightning quick “slap” on the top of the cap with a twisting motion. I couldn’t do it on anyone else’s car. Only mine. You had to have a radiator cap that was removed frequently enough that it came off super easy...which is exactly what mine was.