100 Day Challenge: Day 41
There's been a reoccurring theme of entitlement that I've seen the last few days.
I'm not sure how it applies to me, but "When the bell tolls, it tolls for you."
My baby sister (by baby I mean 20 years old) works at one of local restaurants, it's one of the most popular places in town. Every Thanksgiving they put on a free Thanksgiving Dinner for the community. It was originally done for the older/poorer people in the area. For a number of years people who clearly aren't in need of a free meal have been showing up. A lot of times in groups of 10+ (this year a party of 30+ showed up).
That's all well and good, the restaurant has turned it into a total charity event with a donation bowl for a local cause.
What I find funny/disgusting about the whole situation is what people expect from a free meal. My sister would tell people that for beverages they had choices of: Coffee, Hot Chocolate, and Soda. Simple enough right? A number of people got bent out of shape because my sister wouldn't swap out their drinks for shakes and other things like that. Or there were complaints about not getting refills and things like that.
I feel like I should restate the obvious, this was for a free meal!
I'm not in their shoes, so I suppose I shouldn't judge them.
The light of hope I saw in this whole thing was my sister talking about a group of people with some mental disabilities coming in. They got sat down and my sister took their order. She said they asked for Lemonade, she said she wasn't supposed to. But she gave it to them anyway, because they were happy and grateful. The best part she said was when they asked her where they could donate money. They tried to hand the money to my sister but she just pointed at a fish bowl. Apparently it was enough money to more than pay for all three meals.
(I need to vent about my job a little here, but it's along the same lines I promise.)
One of my favorite things to deal with is people with businesses that are pulling down "thousands of dollars a day" and the entire linchpin in their operation is a service they pay a whopping $6.95 US for even better is a domain forwarding service clients in the UK pay a whopping £17 a year and they forward it to a photo account. Then they expect us to compensate for "lost" revenue.
I'm somewhat stuck here, I understand that we are all at different points of development in life. But really where do we draw the line between development and "You need a lesson in manners." Are there that many people whose lives are so out of control, the only measure of control they have is to try to exert some imagined authority over a complete stranger?
I could extrapolate a number of lessons for myself from this, which is really what this is all about. The biggest is probably that I let people 's attitudes affect me way too much (see: more than not at all).
I know there's a part of me that hopes that someone who yells at Customer Service/Technical Support/What have you, will read this article and understand that we're people too. The people I know from working in the field have been very nice people who just want to do their job the best they can. I myself really like helping people, but I understand that people get what they pay for.