Today, I did something very rude. It was incredibly thoughtless of me and I want to apologize. And, the worst part is - I do this very often, and I never seem to learn. But today, I felt compelled to blog my concerns and MY APOLOGY.
Let me tell you what happened.
I went to buy a couple of dress shirts. I picked up three different colors and took about 20 minutes to match them up with appropriate ties. I looked at cuff links and then made my way to the register. This was in a place where everybody lines up in one aisle right in the middle of the store and the line feeds perpendicular into a row of 6 cash registers.
When I got ready to pay, no one was in front of me, so I stood at the point where the sign reads "line starts here". There were two women standing at registers directly in front of me and they were talking. One was in her 20's and one was in her 40's. The younger one glanced at me and then went on talking. There was third woman working her register to my left and ringing-up a customer. To my right was a young man ringing up a couple of people. The ladies in front of me were still chatting and I assume almost a minute had gone by.
Now I'm wondering if maybe I was standing in the right place. I checked and sure'nuff I was in the right place. Both women glanced back at me, they knew I was still standing there! I'm pretty hard to miss! The young one looked annoyed with my lingering presence and finally asked me, "Can I help you?" I looked at her astonished and said, "Yeah, that's why I'm here." She rang me up, folded my ties and tossed everything in a bag and moved on to the guy behind me.
On my way out to my truck it dawned on me. I was very rude to that woman.
I mean, when you think about it... I left MY house to come to HER job. I decided that I wanted to spend some of MY money at HER place of business. Honestly, how rude of ME was it to pick up shirts and ties that are sold at HER job and expect HER to take MY money for them? Really... what a complete jerk I was to wait so quietly and so patiently while she finished talking and didn't even want to be disturbed and do her job of taking MY money.
I've learned my lesson.
I'm a rude dude.
So, to the young lady at the cash register at that men's store that I like so much - I apologize for interrupting your conversation. It was thoughtless, foolish and rude of me to expect you to be working while you were at your job. I'll try to do better next time by not expecting anything of you.
TTBM
