Be Kinder Than Necessary

This is the story of how I almost got arrested one night after we stopped for gas on our way home from work.

I am not a criminal. I’ve had only one speeding ticket in the past quarter century. In fact, long ago, I prosecuted assorted lawbreakers for five and a half years and still occupy a position in the community where an arrest would…well, it just isn’t an option. I don’t court trouble.

My wife and I usually carpool when we can, even if our hours don’t exactly coincide. Gas and vehicles are just too expensive. This night on our way out of town, gas prices, remarkably, were fluxing down a nickel. I passed the station where I ordinarily would have stopped, because I didn’t see the sign in time. Of the other three stations on the way home, I was sure that the Holiday had not lowered prices yet, knowing them to be slow like that. Even more so, the Mobil in Poplar. So when I saw that Citgo had lowered their prices, we pulled in. I didn’t usually stop there, because not only was Citgo a Venezuelan outfit, there was no pay-at-the-pump. I’m normally not patient enough to pay inside. This night was no exception.

I have a little pillow hanging from the doorknob in my office that says: Lord, grant me patience…and please hurry. Patience is not one of my virtues, I admit it. But I am not alone here. Have you noticed how people drive lately? Or how they conduct themselves in stores, restaurants and other public places? Impatience may well have replaced baseball or reality TV as our favorite national pastime.

I’m a forest dweller, or so I see myself. We have eighty-five acres of woodland, few neighbors and the quiet is usually disturbed only by the birds. I don’t like going out into the world anymore with its traffic, crowds and frenetic pace. It’s hard for me to believe how mindlessly people pilot thousands of pounds of metal at fatal speeds. Please Lord, I often pray, just let me make it home safely…and soon. This night, as usual, I just couldn’t wait to make it home to the peaceful confines of our woods.

I put $38.00 worth of gas into our tank. For some reason, I like to stop on a zero or two, if possible. There was only one other car at a pump, and the driver was already in the store. The clerk sat in the window, watching me walk up to the door…I thought. When I came to the counter with my MasterCard, she got up and mumbled something. OK, my hearing isn’t what it should be either, but communication is also a major failing not just of Americans but all humanity[1]. I said “what,” and she mumbled something with a three in it, and then I clearly said “thirty-eight dollars” just to make sure we were on the same page. She ran my card and gave me the slip. I almost signed it without looking, but then I noticed it was only for twenty-one dollars and some odds cents. I sighed deeply, impatiently. “I said thirty-eight dollars.” I certainly was not being the customer of the year, I know.

My obvious disgust set her off. I didn’t have to be rude, she said, it was just a mistake, yada, yada…yada. She said she’d asked me what pump I’d used (right out her window) and I supposedly said I’d used another one and so on. I could not believe anyone would talk to a customer like this under any circumstances, much less these.

“Excuse me!” I said in a way any boss might before firing an employee on the spot.

That’s when she said she was going to call the police. The police? Was she kidding? Was this woman off her meds or something? Although I couldn’t believe my ears, I could believe her finger punching the buttons and her talking to the police and saying she had a “rude” customer. I had all I could do to control my building fury. If a squad had pulled up just then and the officer saw how angry I was, it would have validated whatever twisted story blubbered from this woman’s mouth. I was starting to dwell on how fat, homely and obviously slow she was above the neck. Not only that, but she was starting to cry. She was still talking, but I was too upset by then to remember what she said.

A woman came up to the counter behind me, and then the man who’d actually pumped the twenty-one dollars of gas. I gritted my teeth and said to the clerk, “would you just charge me the money.”

The rest is fuzzy. I had to get out my card again, and she said I was wrong about having signed the first authorization; and I was and I said “this is what I get for being honest,” and she insisted again that I had been rude. My next thought was that I could just drive this poor, weeping woman into the ground with a few sledge-hammer blows from my tongue but what would that accomplish? She was already a mess. She continued to prattle, and finally I could resist no longer. “You don’t have to be rude,” I said. Would nothing wake her up? She processed both payments and said through her tears that I would not be welcome in that place again. I said “no problem,” and shoved the slips toward her, thinking of a lot more things I could have said. I walked out without a word, somehow quelling a seismic event. I heard the woman behind me tell the clerk she needed to learn how to deal with the public. I knew this woman to be a cashier at a local supermarket. It was amazing how small a city of twenty-eight thousand people can sometimes be, but it was small consolation.

“Is she crying?” my wife asked as I got in the car. “I saw her go to the phone twice. I was wondering what was going on.” I was almost speechless. How could paying for gas have gone so wrong?

Life is constantly catching me with my guard down. I never seem to be ready for the suddenness or ferocity of life’s tests. A friend and businessman later told me this woman should have been fired. Clearly, she was not fit to deal with the slightest dissatisfaction. Still, somehow, I did not feel cleansed. Throwing blame on to others was too easy. Things happen for a reason, and somehow I did not believe my innocent victimhood was it. There was a lesson to be learned. The plain truth of it was that the incident hadn’t happened because this woman was crazy or just having a bad day, it had happened because I had been unkind.

As I reflected on this further, thoughts of calling the manager subsided. I suspected this woman probably needed this job. I had no idea how life’s bruising might have made her so fragile. I thought of something someone had emailed me once, a short little story about how a couple of boaters had come upon a flathead catfish with a basketball stuck in it mouth. The poor creature was exhausted from trying to dive. Eventually, the man’s wife was able to puncture the ball so it could be freed. The story ended with this message: “Be kinder than necessary. 'Cause everyone you meet is fighting some kind of battle.”

I was fortunate to locate it at Big Fish Tackle.

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[1] The subject of a future post at The Night Country.