Yesterday I had an interesting experience. If you had talked to me yesterday, interesting wouldn’t have been the word I used to describe my experience.
I was at Wal-Mart yesterday to return a Christmas present that I had purchased that had broke by the time I got it home. Now usually at Wal-Mart there is someone to greet you with your returns to place a sticker on it. There wasn’t. So I proceed to the customer service desk. After waiting for 10 minutes, I get a lady, who to put mildly, was not happy with her lot in life. She proceeds to look over the returned item and then asks me if I had a sticker put on it. I say, “No ma’am, there wasn’t anyone at the door when I walked in.” She quickly informs me that, “yes there was, there is always someone at the door and next time you need to look for them.” At this point my irritation level just sky rocketed. Here I am not really making any fuss and she’s telling me I need to do the job of the Wal-mart employee? We banter back and forth for another 5 minutes because I’m not giving up, until she talks to the manager. NOT to placate me. OH NO. It’s to reiterate what she’s already told me that there is always someone at the front door. At this point I just walked away.
My anger was astronomical. The reason I walked away was because my anger was at such a boiling point that I couldn’t talk much less articulate what I wanted to say, an issue I have when extremely mad – the inability to articulate thoughts. After thinking a few minutes what I wanted to say was this, “I’m sorry you are apparent in a very bad mood, but that is no reason to take your anger out on me. Furthermore I can’t help but noticed that you just asked me to do the job of your employees. If your company would like to enforce certain return policies then perhaps it should have more diligent employee not customers.” Of course I don’t go back and say this but I did want to get the district managers number and tell him.
However much I might have wanted to go back and lay into this woman, I’m glad I didn’t. It wasn’t until much later that I got over my anger– sorta. I am reading a book called Assassination Vacation. In this book it discusses this religious group (I use that in the loosest terms) called the Oneida group from the 1880’s. (You should google them… that are fascinating to say the least.) This group was an early commune of sorts that had a gathering of around 300 people. Once a month they would take time as a community and have a “Mutual Criticism.” This was what I liked to refer to as a “Clearing of the air.” They would basically choose members of the community to stand in front of everyone and the community would air their grievances about said person. My friends and I did this back in middle school, we called it trampoline talks. You can imagine what would precede these clearing of the air talks. Disgruntled communities members and teenage girls refusing to speak for a few days. Sure it makes the person who gave the speech feel better but what about the poor person who was standing in front of the community getting the verbal beating? Not good, let me tell you. It takes lots of love to continuing be friends after a verbal whipping. I know.
This brings me full circle. Should I have, as the Oneida group, have aired my grievances out to this woman, who might just be having a bad day? Would it have actually helped the situation? Probably not. Because once said grievance were stated, I would have walked away possibly costing that woman a job. So instead, I choose to air my anger out in a community of no faces and wish that lady a peaceful Christmas.
